Secularism as Theopolitics: Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar and the Theological Underpinnings of the State in South Asia

1 Introduction

There are many political theologies because there are, on the one hand, many different religions, and, on the other, many different kinds and methods of doing politics.

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II ^[1]

For historians of South Asia, the early modern South Asian monarch Abū al-Fatḥ Jalāl ud-Dīn Muḥammad Akbar (1542–1605 CE) needs little introduction: he stands out in the popular and scholarly imagination as a ruler identified with successful polity and the achievement of harmonious intercommunal relations. Not only did Akbar employ Jains and Brahmins^[2] and entertain Jesuits at his court,^[3] sponsor intra- and interreligious debates, eliminate the jizya or tax on non-Muslims,^[4] and prohibit forced conversion,^[5] he was also the progenitor of what is sometimes referred to as the “Mughal translation movement”: this was the undertaking, begun by the Mughal court in the sixteenth century, to fund the translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian, the courtly and scholarly lingua franca. The products of this venture have frequently been held up as emblems of religious irenicism, reasoned investigation into religion, or, at the very least, precocious cosmopolitanism. More than simply an emblem of tolerance, Akbar has become, in popular and in scholarly portraiture, nothing less than the secular state made flesh, a pre-modern paragon of even-handed religious polity modeling a liberal ideal.

In the last few years, a dissident strain of scholarship has emerged, spearheaded by the historian Azfar Moin, which invokes the slogan of “political theology”^[6] and sacred kingship in discussing Akbar’s polity and the question of its legacy and interpretation. Akbar, this literature underscores, was the quintessential sacred ruler: a messianic [maṣīḥ-wār] appearance of divine light in the Mongol bloodline whose reign culminated in the first conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in a certain celestial position since the birth of the Prophet Muhammad^[7] – thus portending, for his hagiographers, the onset of a new millenarian episteme. Such a portraiture would appear to pose a significant challenge for the interpretation of Akbar as a Nehruvian in the rough: Akbar could not, it would seem, be both a “secularist avant-la-lettre,” devoted to separating sectarian identity from polity, and a millenarian sacred king par excellence, intent on uniting political and religious powers in his own person.

In this article, I aim to recover and affirm both facets of Akbar’s legend – the sacred and the secular. Akbar, as I conclude, leveled his theology of religions into an integral form of sovereignty^[8] over religion [dīn] and the world [dunyā] – one which allowed for a generous amount of religious liberty for the subjects, yet reserved an ius reformandi for the King. Such a formulation, while alien to the twentieth and twenty-first-century postmetaphysical tradition of secular thought, resembles an earlier recension of secularism in the mode of Henry VIII, Kantorowicz’s Frederick II, and, to some extent, Hobbes’ Leviathan. This mode mandated not the separation of earthly and spiritual powers, but their unification and ascription to the sovereign.^[9]

While ample insight into the integralist form of secularism may be found in the anthropological literature on sacred kingship and in historical sociology,^[10] in keeping with the occasion of this special issue [the centenary of Political Theology and Roman Catholicism and Political Form], I here develop an analysis responsive to the oeuvre of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and political theorist. As I outline, the Akbari sources can productively be brought into conversation with Schmitt in at least two respects.

The first involves the titular interpretation of secularism as a form of theopolitics. In keeping with “Politische Theologie’s” well-known declaration of a systematic correspondence between “the metaphysical image… of the world” in a given epoch and what this epoch “understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization,”^[11] I use the example of Akbar to apply this thesis to the notion of secularism itself.^[12] As I argue, the theological correlate of “secularism” (avant-la-lettre)^[13] in the early modern South Asian context was the Islamicate theology of religions.^[14] That is to say: Akbar’s “tolerant” polity acquired what plausibility and legitimacy it possessed through association with a longstanding, Islamic tradition of investigation into religious difference – an investigation that took place in an avowedly religious horizon. The Mughal emperor was not merely the passive recipient of this tradition: he also helped develop it, by elevating a more radical, Islamicate form of discourse which made the ability to sensitively interpret religious differences into a norm of religious truth.

My thesis is addressed to students of political theology as well as historians of South Asia. Carl Schmitt has not generally been understood to be partial to “secularization” or the “neutral [i.e. secular] state,” a process and institution he linked to Liberal hypocrisy and de-politicization. In Akbar’s example, however, I hope to sketch out a secularism responsive to Schmitt’s critiques: one that does not, like Rawlsian or Habermasian secularism,^[15] deny its metaphysical priors,^[16] or, on the other hand, fail to aim at the integral unity which, to the later Schmitt, was the sine qua non for a successful polity.

The matter of unity – or, as Schmitt sometimes puts it, “totality” – is the second point on which Akbar’s form of sacred kingship is conducive to a Schmittian reading. Here, an appropriate entry point would be Schmitt’s work on Thomas Hobbes.^[17] The figure of the Leviathan was, according to Schmitt’s (questionable) argument,^[18] a “mortal god” meant to guarantee peace and order, which had been degraded into a machine and “destroyed from within.”^[19] The culprit was Hobbes’ proviso for private religious freedom. “The distinction of inner and outer” – i.e., between public cult, under the sovereign’s leadership, and private belief – led to the reduction of the state to an extrinsic mechanism, and a resultant lack of “totality,” or organic unity.^[20] The consequence was a cheapening of communal and individual life: “Once the huge man’s body and soul became a machine,” Schmitt declares, “the transfer back became feasible, and even the little man could become a homme-machine.”^[21]

Such an argument appears to condemn any form of religious tolerance as a fatal poison. Yet here, once again, the Akbari project presents a curious counter-case. While Akbar’s polity made allowance for religious conscience,^[22] it did so in the context of repeatedly asserting the king’s mastery over inner and out, form and content – not only external [ẓāhir] matters but also the innermost reaches [bāṭin] of human souls. Akbar is often contrasted by his chief minister, Abū’l Faḍl, with conventional rulers, concerned only with “surface” or ṣūrī affairs – as he writes in the preface to the initial translation of the Mahābhārata, kings concerned only with “the outward affairs of common people,” not “affairs pertaining to religion” which would involve “investigating the hidden recesses of… minds,” like Akbar.^[23] Abu’l Faḍl’s thesis is that only a sacred king could do the necessary work of bringing the traditional Islamic scholars to heel, or have the wisdom to institute rapprochement amongst South Asian religious communities.^[24]

Indeed, while it would certainly be tenuous to attribute to Abu’l Faḍl an explicit organic theory of the state, it would not be a stretch to attribute to him an absolutist doctrine of “totality,” one which relied primarily on the backdrop of a mystical Islamic Lettrism. This Lettrism relied on concepts referenced in the writings of earlier Islamic authors such as Ibn ʿArabī and Muḥammad al-Jurjānī: among others, the idea of creation as a process of divine pronunciation, and of the Perfect Man [insān-i kāmil] or sacralized human being as a divine Word.^[25] The Mughal court’s innovation was to politicize these ideas and apply them to a ruler.^[26] This led to a form of Lettrist “totalism” in which juridical, religious, political, and hermeneutical questions inevitably came to merge – as they clearly did for Schmitt himself.^[27]

Akbar’s lordship over the dual realms of world and word, ṣūrat [extrinsic form] and maʿnī [meaning or spirit], dīn [religion] and dunyā [worldly order], was not merely a pretty literary construction: it had concrete legal and institutional consequences. A 1579 mahzar or “decree,” for instance, famously declared the Emperor’s right to overrule the mujtahid-s, or scholars of Islamic law, in the case of a difference of opinion.^[28] Akbar’s later investigation into religious difference implied an even more thorough-going power to interpret and decide between sectarian claims. This authority was manifested in the imperial cult of the Tauhīd-i Ilāhī, the “Divine Faith” or civic religion open to participants of all sects,^[29] and in the translation movement, which often rendered Sanskrit or Brahmanical texts into a specifically Akbari idiom.

In asserting the above, I do not, of course, mean to imply that every facet of Carl Schmitt’s (unsystematic) critique of Liberal secularism was answered in the (unsystematic) political and literary products of a sixteenth-century Mughal king. Even less do I pretend to deem the Akbari project an unqualified success. I do, however, want to suggest two things: one, that the Mughal sources reward a Schmittian reading, much more than they have rewarded the uncomplicatedly Liberal lens that has often hitherto been applied to them; and two, that, in asking and answering the question of the relation between politics and religion, these sources seem well equipped to challenge some of Schmitt’s most tenuous conclusions and even to expose the limitations of his thought.

It is a curiosity, for instance, that Carl Schmitt, the progenitor of the idea of “political theology,” does not devote much attention in his writings to the question of “religion.” For Schmitt, politics is “the total”^[30]: religion or theology interests mainly to the degree it becomes political,^[31] or as an (unjustly) banished residue or exception. Akbar, by contrast, a sixteenth-century South Asian ruler by all accounts unable to read and write, consigned considerable time and treasure not only to the political question of the relation between the mundane and spiritual domains but also to the religious investigation of religious differences. As a just look at the Akbari political project suggests, the questions of religion and of religious difference are political questions: questions with special purchase on the nature of sovereignty and the constitution of the State. Yet they are also religious questions – i.e., questions that arise in, and therefore must be answered in, a domain in which the legibility of theological and metaphysical questions is preserved.

In the following sections, I will build on these admissions, move beyond these fitful descriptions, and advance toward a fuller account of a political theology of Akbari “secularism.” First, I will attempt to give unfamiliar readers a taste of Akbar’s own political theology, and how much it could be deemed to fit Schmitt’s schema; second, I will offer a more extended meditation on the theology of religions upon which the latter depended, and how this theology of religions helped to mold the Akbari project’s “totalism”; and finally, I will offer a few thoughts on Akbar’s political mythos in the present, the intervention my interpretation makes in his legend, and how this early modern South Asian comparand might contribute to a greater critical understanding of Carl Schmitt and his thought.

2 From Political Theology to Political Akbar-ology: Abū’l Faḍl’s History of Akbar

The thematic development of my political theology from 1922 takes a general direction which departs from the ius reformandi of the sixteenth century, culminates in Hegel and is evident everywhere today: from political theology to political Christology. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II ^[32]

The king in his kingdom is like the soul in the body and God in the world.

Aquinas, De regime principum ^[33]

Allāh akbar: These are the first words of the Akbarnāma, the hagiographic history of Akbar’s regime authored by his chief minister, Abū’l Faḍl. Wheeler Thackston renders this as “God is supreme.” The second possibility is “Akbar is God.”

According to the testimony of ʻAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Akbar’s courtier and intimate enemy, Allāh akbar became the callsign of Akbar’s imperial cult.^[34] Rather than greeting each other with Salām, “the emperor’s disciples” said “Allāh akbar”; the addressee replied, “jalla jalālahu” (“May his glory be glorified”). Badāʾūnī even says of those initiated into the Tawḥīd-i-Ilāhī^[35] that “Allāh akbar was used by them in the prefaces of their writings.”^[36] The phrase did not remain confined to initiates: it was also apparently a mass slogan. Badāʾūnī alludes to its popularity with a bitter aside:

Praise be to Him! who ruleth absolutely in his kingdom as it pleaseth him. And the common people with as little sense as brute beasts repeated continually nothing but “Allāh akbar.” This caused great commotion.^[37]

Badāʾūnī does not clarify in what contexts the slogan was used by commoners. Elsewhere, however, he describes the Emperor’s exhibition of himself on the palace balcony to lumpen members of the public – “wolves among the sheep, and hunters of the weak”^[38] – who, by his characterization, formed a second, extra-courtly column of the Tauḥīd-i Ilāhī cult.^[39] Allāh akbar was cut on coins and fashioned on the imperial seal.^[40]

In introducing Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar by way of this well-known controversy, I seek first of all to underscore an obvious but unremarked upon irony: that in selecting Akbar as a central emblem of the secular state, secularists have chosen an imminently Schmittian figure – the Mughal sacred king par excellence. Further – in response to a longstanding historiographic dispute^[41] – I contend that the controversies that dogged Akbar’s reign were real and concerned matters which concern us: the sacralized nature of his authority, his religious polity, and theology of religions.

Any honest appraisal of the Akbarnāma would thus note, for instance, the almost total absence from the text of any mention of the Prophet, praise of whom would ordinarily decorate the preface. In the History of Akbar, the absence of one sacred being was clearly meant to make room for another.^[42] This dog whistle, so to speak, did not pass unnoticed by contemporaries: pertinent in this respect is a conversation produced by the poet Ẓuhūr ibn-Ẓuhūrī between himself and his patron, Muḥammad ʿĀdil Shāh, on the merits of his own text vis-a-vis the famed Abū’l Faḍl’s. While praising the Mughal courtier as “talented and versatile,” the poet finds his peer’s lack of faith disturbing: “My writing,” he declares, “contains from beginning to end an eulogy of the Prophet[.] The Akbarnāma, on the other hand, is devoid of any sweetness or appeal because it has no word for the Supreme God.”^[43]

Indeed, the Akbarnāma, for all its emphasis on “peace for all,” was a text conceived not in the repose of precocious Rawlsian neutrality, but in enmity against a politico-theological enemy: the conservatives among the ʻulamā, or religious jurists at court.^[44] Read as a dispassionate document, its argument is often unpersuasive and peculiar, even when situated in its intellectual context.^[45] Treated as a political – i.e., polemical and sectarian – theology, however, its argument becomes more legible. In its opening pages, Abū’l Faḍl refers to this political polarity through the vocabulary of taqlid, “imitation” or “convention,” a concept he uses to open up a space for his newly unencumbered politico-theological doctrine. His “temperament” or fiṭrat, the writer professes, does not allow him to speak simply and conventionally – to, “like fools who belong to the mob of tradition, enter the threshold of eulogization of the Most Holy Lord… contented with borrowed metaphors and workaday tropes.”^[46] By presenting himself as immune to the temptation to default to safety and convention, Abū’l Faḍl sidesteps the obligation to hew explicitly to the exigencies of orthodoxy or tradition.

Yet just as Schmitt was not an advocate of blanket theocracy, so Akbar’s sacred kingship did not consist in a literal assertion of godhood. Indeed, when the propriety of Allāh akbar as a slogan was questioned, Akbar, according to Badāʾūnī, denied that he would ever think to claim divinity, insisting that he “merely looked to the sound of the words.”^[47] This answer itself suggests that the slogan was preferred because it was suggestive of correspondence between divine and political authority – but also that it was not meant to assert a simple identity.

In the Akbarnāma, the meaning of the phrase is first unpacked by the purple paragraph that follows it:

Allāh akbar! What a lofty realization, and a wonderful recognition! For pursuers of truth, seeking subtlety, and morning-souled, enlightened minds; who are discerners in detail of the columns of creation, and appliers of the compass to the tablet of wisdom and insight: in [understanding? or expressing?] the elemental indwelling [tarakkub-i ʻunṣurī] and the material body, i.e., the precious coinage and the sublime pearl—which the frame of evaluation does not encompass, and the scale of estimation cannot weigh; and [which] one does not get into by measuring word[s] [goft], and [which] is beyond the measure of contemplation—nothing save Speech, which is a moving breeze and a billowing wind, have they found.^[48]

Allāh akbar does not mean “Akbar is God”; but neither does it here simply mean, “God is great.” If it did, it is not clear what connection this “lofty realization” would have with the lines that follow it.^[49] The truth-seekers Faḍl subsequently refers to contemplate not the ineffable Creator, but the apotheosized human being: a synthesis of the soul, described here as an “elemental indwelling” of the pearl of divinity, and the material body, also a token of precious value.

Although not expressed explicitly, the implication is that the relationship between these two terms – the soul and the body – corresponds in some way to the relationship between the two words, Allāh and Akbar. The passage thus comments on the significance of Allāh Akbar qua the political slogan.^[50] The logic of the exegesis is incarnational: Akbar – an ideal token of the human type, a synthesis of divine being and material form – is the middle term that translates the ineffable God into speech, and, more broadly, as the Akbarnāma will go on to assert, into history.

The mention of “speech” [sukhan] that closes the quotation above prompts an epistemological turn: an investigation of the text’s own semiotic ground. Abū’l Faḍl lauds the nobility and power of sukhan as so forbidding as to prompt silence, while, on the other hand, underscoring its inability to comprehend the ineffable: “Praise to the God beyond compare [bī-chūn] is beyond the premises of possibility,” he writes, “and eulogy of the Lord without like is greater than the accounting of beings.”^[51] The difficulty, at first abstract, soon becomes a personal and spiritual crisis for the authorial voice: no text can begin without a preface which praises God, and yet Abū’l Faḍl finds himself unable to write one. This crisis is eventually resolved as the author gives ear to another internal voice, which addresses him with the following:

Oh sculptor in the picture-studio of maʿnī, why don’t you compose a book, [whose] preface you may decorate with praise? You should write the account of the ruler over the age and over the earth, the jewel in the crown of kings, and praise of the divine will come [of itself] into the writing, and benediction of God into the picture.^[52]

How should this suggestion resolve anything? The voice explains:

Praise does not require praise: for the creations of the Maker are [themselves] flawless praise of the perfect Distributor of Justice, pronounced in a tongueless tongue. And it is evident that in the material world, there is no greater effect [i.e. contingent thing] and no nobler matter than the precious being of glorious kings: the execution of the external order of the world is dependent upon the sacred strength of their grasp.^[53]

There is no difficulty with praise, Abū’l Faḍl seems to say, as it is not the creation that praises God: God praises himself in the language of creation. Praise of this sort, as it is “pronounced in a tongueless tongue” – i.e., Being itself, understood as a language – avoids the limitations of human speech [sukhan]. It is not, however, all creatures that constitute this language of praise in equal measure, but Kings, in particular, who are the crème de la crème of the created order. “To hand over a world to a [single] individual,” Abū’l Faḍl continues, “and to assign worldly venture to a [single] person, is to place the world of meaning [jahān-i maʻnī] in him, or rather to fashion the soul of the world of meaning.”^[54] The use of the term “meaning,” or maʻnī prolongs the semiotic analogy: Akbar is King of the world – and thus, the focal point of the hermeneutico-ontological horizon. The double-meaning of maʻnī, as a word also meaning “spirit,” however, prompts a broader discussion of the special nature of Akbar’s authority, over both externals and inner, spiritual, or religious matters.^[55]

As it further dilates on the incarnational nature of its subject, the Akbarnāma mixes and matches concepts and vocabulary from several sources and traditions. On the one hand, Akbar is described pointedly by Abū’l Faḍl as a Perfect Man [insān-i kāmil] – not a typical title for a King. The idea of the insān-i kāmil derives from the other “Akbarian” tradition – that of al-shaikh al-akbar, the Andalusian philosopher Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240).^[56] In the latter’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam [“Bezels of Wisdom”], the Perfect Man is first and foremost the first man, Adam. The creation of Adam occurs when God desires to comprehend the beauty of his own attributes and essence. God requires, therefore, “an all-inclusive being containing all of [His Names]” that will serve as a mirror.^[57] God or “the Real” [al-ḥaqq] creates the universe to be that mirror, but, without Adam, it remained “an indistinct shape without a spirit in it… an unpolished mirror.” Adam becomes the spirit of the world, and therefore, “the clearness of this mirror.”^[58] “All that exists in the divine forms,” Ibn ʿArabī asserts, “that is, (God’s) names, appears in the human structure.”^[59]

In the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, the idea of the Perfect Man as a divine Word is especially associated with one other figure in addition to Adam: this is the Prophet Jesus, whom the author understands to have been conceived directly by divine and/or angelic breath. In the Akbarnāma as well, Jesus, unexpectedly, becomes a central presence.^[60] Akbar’s birth is treated as an event of world-historical significance, explicitly compared to the birth of Christ. The original incarnational event, however, in this case, is supposed to have taken place long ago, with the impregnation of the mythical Mongolian princess, Alanquoa, an event described in the Secret History of the Mongols. Abū’l Faḍl writes:

One night the divine light-bred [Alanquoa] was sleeping on [her] tranquil bed, leaning upon four quiet cushions, when all of a sudden a wondrous light cast a beam into the tent; and that light entered the mouth and orifice of that well-spring of knowledge and presence, and that edifice of chastity became pregnant by that light, in the fashion of Mary, the daughter of Amram.^[61] Subḥānaʼllāh!^[62]

The Mongol tradition of Illuminationist divine right is the second general source the Akbarnāma draws on for its hagiographic synthesis. Abū’l Faḍl does not simply reproduce this claim, however, but instead gives it an expansive twist: Alanquoa herself, though not immaculately conceived like Mary, became a “workshop of Being” only as a result of a lengthy development of this divine light, which had been “taking shape in the cradle of instruction over thousands of years, generation after generation.”^[63] After Alanquoa, the light became manifest again in Hindūstān “after the education of many further generations, traversed in the holy garb of other manifestations, for the sake of obtaining perfection.”^[64]

The sheer ambition of this apotheosis has been underappreciated by the historiography. The History of Akbar seeks to accomplish something of nearly Hegelian proportions: a history of a man who, in his person, represents the culmination of the historical experience of a divine Spirit over the course of many thousands of years. In light of space constraints, however, rather than going on to fully unpack this doctrine of “temporal divinity,”^[65] I will pause to take stock of the relevance of what I have presented for the larger argument. At the minimum, I hope I have demonstrated in this reading that the Akbarnāma certainly contains a “political theology” – most basically, a way of anchoring political authority in metaphysics. The History of Akbar, as I would more broadly argue, is justly and helpfully related to nearly every relevant understanding of this phrase.

First, on the broadest level, it is obvious that one cannot understand Abū’l Faḍl’s project without confronting the question of the relation of the religious and the political. The question of the relation is one that Abū’l Faḍl himself forces on his readers through repeated, provocative references to Akbar’s authority over both.^[66] Even more so, a contemporary reader cannot understand the text’s position without establishing some critical distance from a presentist understanding of the relation. Reading the Akbarnāma will thus require the broader, critical context that many invoke through the phrase, “political theology.”

Second, one cannot comprehend what Abū’l Faḍl is up to without reconstructing the Akbarnāma’s broader metaphysical, philosophical, and theological context. Otherwise, the majority of what Abū’l Faḍl says will come off to a modern reader as fluff: an unpersuasive, exaggerated rhetorical divinization of a historical monarch whose polity can still perhaps be appreciated for its “tolerance.” While it may be possible to study the “Mughal state” from a comfortable distance while treating theology and metaphysics as chaff and window dressing, it is not possible to read the Akbarnāma while remaining so aloof. The plausibility of the text’s understanding of legitimacy and sovereignty depends on its metaphysics and theology. Such a situation calls to mind Schmitt’s Weberian, “sociological” understanding of political theology as a descriptive methodology.^[67]

Third, as was described at the outset, the Akbarnāma is a polemical text, aimed against a politico-theological enemy. The work thus contains a “political theology” in something close to the way Heinrich Meier understands this term: a doctrine rooted in metaphysics and theology that centers the either/or for/against of the Schmittian political, a domain governed by the friend/enemy distinction.^[68]

Yet The History of Akbar also, finally, arguably contains something over and above the “political theology” Carl Schmitt first developed. Even as he extolled the possibilities of Catholic politics,^[69] kept company with members of the Conservative Revolution,^[70] and served as supposed “kronjurist” for the Third Reich, the Schmitt of these tumultuous times mainly refrained from lifting the hood of theology and religion and tinkering with the innards. He was a jurist, after all, not a metaphysician or theologian. In the well-known formulation of Schmitt’s 1922 essay, metaphysical images of the world belonging to a given “epoch” determine the structure of how human beings think about sovereignty.^[71] There is not much sense that one could achieve political goals by fine-tuning these images. This would be almost as far-fetched as if Foucault attempted to create his own “discourse,” or Castoriadis his own “social imaginary.”

It is mainly in his last testament, the bitter and cryptic Political Theology II (1969), that Schmitt partially abandons this prior restraint.^[72] In the latter text, Schmitt hints at a development of his thought in excess of “political theology”: an unorthodox “political Christology” that posited a state of “stasis” or “uproar” within the Trinity itself.^[73] Even God, apparently, does not transcend the political. Schmitt in Political Theology II attempts to oppose one “legend” – that political theology is forbidden to Christians post-Constantine – with another, i.e., “that political theology is written into Christianity because of the Incarnation.”^[74] This late-stage merging of metaphysics or theology with myth follows up on a closing aside in a 1937 essay on Hobbes, in which Schmitt muses that perhaps “the ‘total’ concepts of modern times are not at all meant as concepts but as myths,” and that “[t]otalization thus means mythization.”^[75] In Political Theology II, Schmitt speaks admiringly of the totalism of what he understands to be Hegel’s marriage of religion and state and approves a comparison of himself to Eusebius, the fourth-century Bishop who served as Constantine’s apotheosizer. “To be named alongside Eusebius is an undeserved honor for me,” the unrepentant German writes, “although I would not deny the compliment, which implies a validation [of my position].”^[76]

Schmitt’s Constantine, however, never came: Abū’l Faḍl’s reigned.^[77] The political theology Abū’l Faḍl developed in the Akbarnāma was not only (1) a renegotiation of the boundaries between dīn and dunya [religion and the world], (2) a conception of sovereignty with theological and metaphysical correlates, or (3) a political enmity justified in the language of revelation. The Akbarnāma rather contains what Schmitt, toward the end of his life, could only gesture toward with his “political Christology”: a definite politico-theological doctrine reconciling God and man, politics and religion, philosophy and history in one sovereign leader. This “political Akbar-ology” was neither wholly new nor wholly dissolvable into its metaphysical, theological, and political priors. It was, like Schmitt’s agonistic Trinitarianism, a daring synthesis.^[78]

3 The Totalism of the Akbari Dispensation

Should house and precinct experience the absence of the dread and the hope of a Leader, and not become integrated into a political order, [then], without the awe of the receiver of God’s splendor, how would the uproar of [this] hornet’s nest of a world ever come to rest?

Abū’l Faḍl, Āīn-i-Akbarī ^[79]

In the introduction to this essay, I suggested that Akbar’s form of integral, theopolitical kingship could be productively compared with Carl Schmitt’s discourse on “totality” in the highly specific context of his inter-war critique of Thomas Hobbes.^[80] A careful reader of these writings will notice, however, that in the 1938 monograph on Hobbes, “totality” and its more ideological synonym, “totalism,” remain in the background: they are referenced only in the context of passing remarks which decry how “western democracy [incorrectly] perceives [the image of the Leviathan] to be a polemical horror picture of a ‘totalitarian’ state and of ‘totalism.’”^[81] “Total,” for its part, is demoted to a mere “catchword,” “which can have an infinite number of meanings.”^[82] Such a cautious approach probably reflects Schmitt’s disillusionment with the regime in Germany. The jurist appears at pains, in his Leviathan, to dissociate his position from national socialism and “totalitarianism.”

In the 1937 essay (“The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Decartes”) which preceded this book, however, the treatment of “totalism,” “totality,” and “total” is more positive, if somewhat vague. Hobbes’ state, Schmitt argues, does not lack totality in concreto: there is in it a “total” obedience, for instance, which comes part and parcel with the state power’s “total responsibility for protecting and securing the safety of citizens.”^[83] However, Hobbes’ notion of “the state as a covenant entered into by individuals” is entirely inadequate, and “did not suggest the [actual] totality” of the Hobbesian state.^[84] Hobbes, Schmitt asserts, misinterpreted the substance of his own creation, and missed its total nature. The “sovereign-representative person,” the Leviathan, is in actuality “much more than the sum total of all the participating particular wills” – a merely numerical totalism. An individualistic covenant entered into out of fear could “affirm” but not “crea[te] this new god.”^[85]

In the essay’s conclusion, Schmitt returns to the question of “totality,” a concept he here embraces but recognizes as underdetermined. The stakes of the inquiry are serious: even if the nature of “totality” is not clear, the consequences of its absence – a mechanical state and age – are evident and existentially dire. The mechanization of the state, Schmitt argues, has led to a mechanization of the human being, and to a corresponding absence of “meaningful totality” even in individual life. However, “[f]or the word and concept totality to remain meaningful and not to become a misleading catchword,” he acknowledges, “it must rest on a specific philosophical connection.”^[86] Casting-about for options, Schmitt floats several possibilities: “the ‘finite infinite’ of Hegel’s philosophy,” the apprehension of “totalization” as a “mythization” in the philosophy of Georges Sorel, and the doctrine of “temporal divinity” which “Hegel ascribes to the leading people in world history.”^[87]

The idiosyncratic Lettrism of the Akbari court can, I provocatively suggest, be regarded as another candidate. It provided a philosophical backdrop which, in its own context, integrated sovereignty and religion, worldly wisdom and spiritual aplomb – in a manner intended to have implications at once philosophical, juridical, and political. Moreover, it did all of this while constituting a dramatic exception to one of Schmitt’s core assumptions: namely, that any “total” or “genuine” state must necessarily minimize pluralism along relevant axes. The mature Akbari regime, while by no means a “neutral” state, and by all means committed to peace and security, made recognition, investigation, and toleration of religious diversity one of its fundaments. In what follows, I explore the internal logic of this Lettrist totalism as it is presented in Abū’l Faḍl’s corpus, before contrasting its terms with Hobbes – as he appears in Schmitt’s critique – and Schmitt’s late thirties, ambivalent, antitotalitarian but nonetheless illiberal position.

4 Emperor of Form and Meaning: The Politico-theological Doctrine of Abū’l Faḍl

He packed his bags: the one who, gestated for a period of two centuries / [had] emerged from the womb of mother time

One like him will not appear in a hundred thousand years / the world will end before [it is] pregnant with [his] like Akbarnāma ^[88]

“Lord of ṣūrat and maʿnī, the unique [yagāna] Akbar Shāh”: so reads the first hemistich of one of the verses the Akbarnāma inscribes to mark its patron’s passing.^[89] The terms ṣūrat and maʿnī can literally be rendered “form” and “meaning,” or, less literally, “appearance” and “essence.”^[90] As their use here suggests, they were central to the Akbarnāma’s articulation of Jalāl ud-dīn Akbar’s claim to integral power.

The idea of Akbar as a “Lord of ṣūrat and maʿnī” was multivalent across multiple domains: it suggested sovereignty over linguistic form and content, external affairs and inner life, the exoteric and the esoteric, matter and spirit, religion and politics. While ṣūrat and maʿnī could refer to any or all of these, the logic of the linkage between them disproportionately depended, again, on a backdrop of mystical Lettrism that equated word and world, and thus, the duality of form and meaning in spoken or written language with other salient dualities and divisions.

The application of ṣūrat and maʿnī to a theory of language and semiosis is most explicit in an important early section of the Institutes of Akbar devoted specifically to the visual and written arts, entitled “The Institute of the Picture-Studio.” “Ṣūrat leads the way to its Lord,” the text there asserts, “and takes [one] to maʿnī, just as the shape of a character [causes one to arrive at] the letter and word.”^[91] An explanation of this process as evident in language is provided in a subsequent paragraph:

From the domain of knowledge [ʿilm-zār] of the divine, a ray of light falls upon the person [nafs] endowed with speech [nāṭiqa]. The mind [dil] sends it to the cosmopolis of the imagination, which is the interstitial zone between immaterial [mujarrad] and material [māddī], so that [a hybrid whole]—an isolation mingled with relation, and a liberty mixed with obligation—arises. And from there, stepping onto the top of the tongue, with the help of the air, it enters the little peep-holes of the ears; and after this, shedding the burden of relation from its shoulders with each step, it returns to its own locale.^[92]

The written word works much the same way, with the difference that the ray of light travels through the fingers onto the page, remaining there until it is liberated through the eye of the reader.

The description of language in the above is reminiscent of the aforementioned passage in the Akbarnāma on the meaning of the political slogan, “Allāh Akbar.” Where the word or character is “an isolation mingled with relation, and a liberty mixed with obligation,”^[93] the phrase Allāh[u] Akbar is said to describe a combination of “the elemental indwelling [tarakkub-i ʻunṣurī] and the material body, i.e., the precious coinage and the sublime pearl”: divinity, that is, manifest in the body of a man, just as it manifests in the materiality of speech or writing. While “[the letter] is,” according to the Abu’l Faḍl, “the inner chamber where light is confined,”^[94] Akbar is himself, again, a manifestation of divine light in the Mongol bloodline. As a couplet glossing the Akbarnāma’s introductory paragraph declares:

What sort of Speech should this be that has been made manifest?

It has pulled down the veil from the eighteen thousand [worlds].^[95]

This verse, in my reading, alludes to the process of Creation in its Akbarian^[96] description as a process of pronunciation: According to one reconstruction,^[97] God sends his vivifying breath out in a cloud of “fixed entities” or “immutable essences” [aʻyān-i ṣābitah], somewhat akin to the Platonic forms,^[98] which are the “letters” pronounced. God’s speech brings the aʻyān-i ṣābitah from behind the veil of unmanifest existence to embodiment.

Language, as Abū’l Faḍl goes on to clarify, orders the world, taking on a governmental role: “Without [speech’s] aid, execution of the rule of meaning/Spirit [maʻnī] would be impossible[;] and without its assistance, prosperous inhabitation of the wasteland of [embodied] form [ṣūrat] would be inconceivable.”^[99] It is probable, given this context, that the “Speech” referred to in the aforementioned hemstitch is the Emperor himself: he is the incarnate praise of God that bridges the gulf between divine and human speech, between – in Akbarian terminology – “the Names” and “the names of the Names.”^[100]

The ability of language to transmit divine light in the magical movement from form to meaning is, moreover, related by Abū’l Faḍl to the charism of the Emperor. In “The Picture Studio,” the identification of Akbar with writing is accomplished through subsequent passages that detail the size of Akbar’s library, his sponsoring of translations from various languages, his breadth of knowledge, and his particular attention to the written word among the other arts. The “world-Lord,” Abū’l Faḍl professes, “delegates great attention [to writing], and he looks deeply into [the issue of] form and meaning [ṣūrat u maʿnī].”^[101] Here, the latter terms again refer most evidently to semiotic categories.

That ṣūrat and maʿnī have a broader range, however, can be noticed in any number of passages from Abu’l Faḍl’s hagiographic corpus. In some, “form” and “essence” are set side by side in the binary of “evident” or “external” [ẓāhir] and “hidden” or “inner” [bāṭin].^[102] Elsewhere in the Āʾīn-i Akbarī, Akbar is thus designated “the world lord [who is] the chief over ṣūrat and maʿnī, and the Emperor of [both] outer and inner [ẓāhir u bāṭin].”^[103] While ẓāhir and bāṭin are also multivalent terms, they are relatable to concrete claims about Akbar’s judgment of character: his insight into the mind and heart, a realm of hidden and inaccessible things. “Even while being completely occupied with worldly matters,” Abū’l Faḍl writes in his preface to the Razmnāma, “his mind lays bare the recesses of the minds of various groups of people and gains awareness of the secrets of their hearts.”^[104]

These powers are also linked by Abū’l Faḍl to the issue most central to our concerns: namely, Akbar’s authority over both religion and worldly order [dīn and dunyā].^[105] The first such usage comes in the first two incidences of the phrase “ṣūrat and maʿnī” in the Akbarnāma. As the unnamed voice of assurance again declares:

Praise does not require praise: for the creations of the Maker are [themselves] flawless praise of the perfect Distributor of Justice, pronounced in a tongueless tongue. … Lordship over ṣūrat and maʿnī and, the ability to resolve the riddle of inner and outer, should be delegated to him, for he is the decorator of the royal throne, and the raiser of the standard of the shadow of the divine for our blessed age.^[106]

While the language above is somewhat opaque, a clue to what Abū’l Faḍl may have in mind soon follows. “So long as, in [this] material world,” the History declares, “leadership over the masters of hermitage, which they call ‘sanctity,’ and headship over those who possess attachment, which they term ‘government,’ remained separate, amongst the human race, the tumult of opposition held souls in confusion.”^[107] Abū’l Faḍl terms “these two precious offices” – i.e., sainthood and sovereignty – “the underpinning of administration over ṣūrat and maʿnī.”^[108]

A similar formulation occurs in an aforementioned passage in the preface to the Razmnāma, the initial translation of the Mahābhārata. There, Abū’l Faḍl addresses the tendency of earlier, conventional kings to hand off spiritual matters to religious authorities, a situation that has led to general spiritual blindness. Even “exalted kings, who are pillars of this world,” the courtier complains, did not make it their business to question “the hidden recesses of the minds of the ‘wearers of turbans’ [i.e. the traditional Islamic scholars],” deeming the hidden things “among the affairs pertaining to religion [muʿāmalāt-i dīnī]” and therefore outside their purview.^[109] Yet Akbar – whom the text implies is a “manifestation of the divine name ‘the Hidden’ [al-Bāṭin]”^[110] – carries the capacity to judge what is concealed, and thereby to overrule the ʿulamā.^[111] As such, the Lord of “form and meaning,” “inner and outer” has attained to a truly unitary, politico-theological caliphate.

For true believers in Akbar, it is worth noting that this integral authority apparently held a personal appeal: it provided relief from the existential anxieties that can result from the contradiction between worldly wisdom and religious stricture.^[112] While I refrain in this essay from discussing Akbar’s imperial and popular cult, testimony on this point is available in a familiar source. Whereas the Akbarnāma’s introduction skips swiftly from the personal to the world historic, presenting an account of its author’s writer’s block as a propaedeutic to a grandiose apotheosis of its central subject, the history’s khātima or afterward retreads this narrative in a more intimate mode, while filling in a few autobiographical details. Akbar, once again, becomes the bridge that reconciles earth and heaven and inspires speech: here, however, as Abū’l Faḍl tells it, the King does so by freeing him from a mistaken quietism. While he had previously believed that the “complete man [mardum-i timām]” must take no interest in the world, Akbar’s enlightening influence leads to a resurgence of worldly ambition as well as spiritual insight.^[113] It is in the context of the story of Abū’l Faḍl’s ascendence at court and his assumption of the role of chief hagiographer that Akbar’s integral power over multiple domains is again introduced. “One morning,” the courtier remarks, “I began to beg for the illumination of the Lord of Light’s presence, and to request the appearance of this ṭilism which resolves difficulty.”^[114] Akbar’s charism leads to Abū’l Faḍl’s mastery over both ṣūrat and maʻnī, an achievement that leads him, ultimately, to the written word – itself a hybrid, as we have seen, of these two principles.^[115] While his newfound outlook leads the author at first to long for military achievement, the courtier is instead directed by Akbar to brandish the pen rather than the sword. At first, filled again with doubt – he professes no command over or attraction toward rhetoric [sukhan-sarāyī] – he is revitalized by his patron: “The imperial order,” Abū’l Faḍl concludes, “is a charm for oratory, and a talisman which illumines knowledge.”^[116]

5 Death by Distinction: Schmitt’s Monograph on Hobbes’ Leviathan

In the eighteenth century the leviathan as magnus homo, as the godlike sovereign person of the state, was destroyed from within. The distinction of inner and outer became for the mortal god a sickness unto death.

Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes ^[117]

In the previous section, I described how Akbar’s totalistic sovereignty was expressed through his authority over various binary formulas: “form” and “meaning,” “evident” and “hidden,” and “inner” and “outer.” Schmitt’s 1938 book (Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes), by contrast, while not addressing the subject of “totality” directly, speaks of this ideal apophatically in describing the “magnus homo’s” death by binary and differentiation. While mentioning various oppositional pairings – “content and form, aim and character,”^[118] “invisible vis-a-vis visible, conviction vis-a-vis attitude, private vis-a-vis public, stillness vis-a-vis noise, [and] esoteric vis-a-vis ordinary”^[119] – the jurist focuses most of his ire on the distinction between “inner and outer” mentioned in the aforementioned epigraph.

The rubric of “inner and outer” had an illustrious career in early modern German political theory, where it was invoked as a metaphor for (external) state power and the (inner) freedom of the individual and/or public – a backdrop beyond the scope of this article.^[120] As employed by Schmitt in this context, however, the phrase picks out the disjunction in Hobbes’ system between external cult and inner conviction. While the Leviathan mandated public assent to the religious dogmas decreed by the sovereign, Schmitt emphasized that Hobbes had included a small “proviso” for private dissent. The latter is introduced in the course of a discussion of miracles, which itself inaugurates Hobbes’ examination of the principles that should govern a “Christian Commonwealth.”^[121]

Hobbes here, in a manner of speaking, seeks absolute assurance against the “exception”: the possibility that a prophet with direct authority from God could appear, perform miracles, and override a subject’s due obedience to his king.^[122] There are only two scriptural criteria, the Leviathan responds, according to which a prophet may be judged genuine: “the doing of miracles” and “the not teaching any other religion than that which is already established.”^[123] In addressing the first criteria, Hobbes reaps the happy harvest of the skeptical, empiricist metaphysics he has been sowing since the Leviathan’s first pages. Dreams being “for the most part natural”^[124] – a left-over of the sensory experiences accumulated throughout the day^[125] – and visions being, in many cases, nothing more than a dream confused with waking life,^[126] there is simply no assurance, he explains, that a claim to have received divine instructions is not actually a lie or an error.^[127]

Hobbes’ gloss on the second criteria – allegiance to the Christian religion – is of a different nature, but equally striking. “How great soever the miracle be,” Hobbes declares,

yet if it tend to stir up revolt against the king, or him that governeth by the king's authority, he that doth such miracle, is not to be considered otherwise than as sent to make trial of their allegiance. For these words, revolt from the Lord your God, are in this place equivalent to revolt from your king.^[128]

Hobbes defends this startling statement by asserting that the origins of Judeo-Christianity lie in essentially political covenants. The Hebrews had made God king on Mount Sinai, with Moses as the communicant of God’s will; likewise, the gospel itself consists of assent to Christ’s kingship. Obedience to God being obedience to a king, loyalty to a king is therefore – by a blurry logic – one and the same as loyalty to the gospel. Religion is merely a continuation of politics by other means.^[129] There is no miracle or vision or angel from heaven, Hobbes concludes, that should tempt the subject of the state to disobedience.^[130] The head of state retains the power to judge the exception – and thus remains genuinely sovereign.

However, obedience is not the same as belief. The king may, as Hobbes says, “oblige me to obedience,” including public assent to belief in a particular miracle or dogma; but not, of course, “to think any otherwise than my reason persuades me.”^[131] While this logic may be impeccable given Hobbes’ assumptions, the conclusions he reaches are an entailment of his radical agnosticism about religious or supernatural questions, be they miracles, visions, or even the issue of the Scriptures’ divine authorship.^[132] As these are uncertain matters, not subject to proof by argument or experience, it is the voice of authority alone, established by reason, that should decide them; yet authority does not extend to what is impossible for it, namely, the persuasion of private doubts.

As Schmitt explains to his readers, Hobbes’ agnosticism was, most immediately, designed as an enlightened defense of a royal miracle: Charles II’s healing touch.^[133] Paradoxically, however, this defense of politico-religious authority was also the beginning of liberalism’s divestment from the theological: “The neutral state,” he writes, “originated at this point.”^[134] Yet it did come about all at once. Hobbes’ allowance for private conscience – the byword of the times, written directly into the Peace of Westphalia a few years earlier^[135] – remained, at first, a “barely visible crack.”^[136] It took “a liberal Jew,” Spinoza, to expand this crack into the dreaded “inroad of modern liberalism,” leading to a “decisive turn in the fate of the leviathan.”^[137]

How was this accomplished? According to Schmitt, Spinoza, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, followed Hobbes’ lead in making “external cult” subject to the state. Rather than emphasizing public assent to a common creed, however, he focused on the opposite: the free reign given to a private “piety.” Hobbes’ move to publicize and politicize religion, in other words, was met with an insidious response, which privatized religion’s substance, leaving the exterior as an empty and fragile husk to be eventually brushed away. This reversal of “inner and outer” was, in Schmitt’s tendentious account, perpetrated by an “outsider.” “The Englishman [Hobbes],” he writes, “did not endeavor with… [his] proviso [for private dissent] to appear out of context of the beliefs of his people but, on the contrary, to remain within it, whereas the Jewish philosopher… who approached the religion of the state as an outsider, naturally provided a proviso that emanated from the outside.”^[138] Spinoza’s move was influential and set in motion a momentous chain of events:

Now it is the inverse: Individual freedom of thought is the form-giving principle, the necessities of public peace as well as the right of the sovereign power having been transformed into mere provisos. …The absolute power of the state, the sovereign-representative person, defeated the estates and the church and governed public events and the politico-historical stage while driving the invisible distinctions of outer and inner, public and private to an ever sharper separation and antithesis. Through Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, Hobbes’ theory emerged victorious on the continent, but only at the expense of the relationship between outer and inner which was reversed.^[139]

In effect, de-mystified, drained of metaphors and antisemitic outbursts, Schmitt’s narrative describes a recognizable process: that through which an early, integralist secularism, consisting in the triumph of the (politico-theological) state over the (politico-theological) church, mutated into the secularism of separation evident in the “neutral state” – a government supposedly innocent of metaphysical commitments and walled off from religion.

The next insidious step after the prying apart of “inner and outer” was the exploitation of a dichotomy between “content and form, aim and character,” or in concreto, ethics and law. This distinction, which Schmitt pins on “the nineteenth-century Jewish philosopher, Friedrich Julius Stahl-Jolson,” resulted in “the elimination of content from the notion of truth and justice” and the emergence of Schmitt’s principal enemy in his earlier, seminal works: legal positivism.^[140] Its result, in Schmitt’s framing, was a state drained of life and vigor, a machine state without character finally unable to resist its intimate enemies. In his concluding paragraph, the jurist bitterly blames his own spiritual enemies – Spinoza, Stahl-Jolson, legal positivists, Freemasons, and a whole host of other distinction-mongering villains – for the constitutional state’s demise at the hands of “illiberal” parties (i.e., the communists and national-socialists), who “cut up the leviathan and divide[d] his flesh among themselves.”^[141] (It was in a similar spirit that, on January 30, 1933, Schmitt had written, “[o]n this day, one can see that Hegel [i.e. the Hegelian state] died.”)^[142]

There are multiple axes on which Schmitt’s narrative in the above could be set alongside the Akbari sources I have discussed – none of which, of course, would involve a naive splicing of the sixteenth-century South Asian materials into Schmitt’s terms. For the moment, however, I will restrict myself to a clear point of contrast.

By the argument of Schmitt, the state’s death by distinction, its inability to secure a unity of “form and content,” “inner and outer,” began with an apparently minor concession to religious freedom. In the hagiographic materials on Akbar, by contrast, religious tolerance and even purported freedom of conscience was a propaedeutic to Jalāl ud-dīn Akbar’s integral rule over ṣūrat [form] and maʿnī [meaning], ẓāhir [outer], and bāṭin [inner]. The immediate difference, as I alluded to in an earlier section, is not that the Akbari regime was not a “total state” in the basic sense of one able to “discriminate between friend and enemy,”^[143] but that Akbar’s assumption of the mantle of spiritual and temporal authority was polemically aimed at the conventional Islamic scholars,^[144] and not at religious diversity as such. The ʿulamā were an obstacle, in the courtly view, to “peace for all” [ṣulh-i kull], or the rapprochement of the regime toward all sectarian parties; they also happened to hold jurisprudential power Akbar desired to appropriate. Translated into Hobbesian terms, this would be as if Charles II’s primary antagonists were Protestant pastors-cum-legislators, who stood in the way of him claiming the spiritual authority necessary to achieve good terms with Catholic laity.^[145]

There is a deeper contrast here to be drawn, however, with both Schmitt and Hobbes.

Rather than uncomplicatedly collapse the “total religion” of monotheism into an undifferentiated “political monotheism”^[146] – the explicit move of Hobbes in his Leviathan, and the implicit tendency of the cuius regio, eius religio-phase of European secularism – Akbar in my reading sought a form of integral authority that could transcend but also mediate between spheres and sectarian identities. The Mughal emperor, a sacred being, rose above divisions and differences; he did not abolish them. Indeed, the peculiarity of the Akbari regime, as I will explore in the following sections, was that its rhetoric, so to speak, actually gained momentum from the encounter with religious diversity. Rather than make light of difference by making it a private and unimportant affair, Akbar’s court sought to educate the populace into a greater awareness of it, encouraging the potentially dizzying and unnerving encounter with religious pluralism. Such a situation – an integral, totalistic project of politico-theological sovereignty which depended on a backdrop of (internal) pluralism – would no doubt have seemed paradoxical to Carl Schmitt in any period of his life.^[147] Yet to every rule, so to speak, “there are exceptions.”^[148]

6 Seeker, Sovereign, Sacred Being: Akbar and Religion

Many times he said, “A human being is one who sends equity out in the forefront of his quest and selects from every [religious] group what is pleasing to wisdom. Perhaps in this manner the lock, the key to which has been lost, can be opened.”The History of Akbar ^[149]

Alongside the Akbarnāma’s portraiture of Akbar as the culmination of history, and its attribution to him of an integral spiritual [maʿnawī] and temporal [ṣūrī] sovereignty, is something equally striking: the notion of Akbar as not only a sacred being but also a sacred being in search of religious truth. Akbar, in Abū’l Faḍl’s pregnant expression, is “the perfect man… the Truth-worshiping king… the sovereign of the world who has lifted the veil from the external and the internal by his seeking for and finding God [emphasis added].”^[150] This searching and finding is linked, in the Akbarnāma, with political authority and with polity: the quest for religious truth involves not only private gnosis but also a state-sponsored investigation into religious diversity, an investigation which Faḍl frames as uniquely fitted for a person of his patron’s rank and as bestowing “peace to all” [ṣulḥ-i kull].^[151] Akbar is no ordinary King, with rule only over externals. Rather he is one whose gnostic insight and spiritual rank affords him “rule of the material and spiritual and absolute authority over the external and internal.”^[152]

Any treatment of the term and concept religion in a premodern non-Western context, of course, merits a brief statement of position. Despite various arguments to the contrary, religion – translatable in various senses through various terms in Persian and Arabic such as dīn, madhhab, kesh, millat, ummat, and ṭā’ifa – was imminently a category in elite Persophone circles in sixteenth-century Hindūstān. Bequeathed to the Mughals was a long tradition of Islamic concern with religious diversity,^[153] borne out particularly in the genre of Islamic doxography, extant since at least the tenth century.^[154] Unlike the contemporary discipline of religious studies, but similar to earlier discourses of religion in the West, the Islamic investigation into religious difference was both avowedly impartial and carried out in a broadly religious and assumedly sectarian context.

A taste of this tradition can be given through a brief mention of a contemporary source: the Tauḍīḥ al-milal [The Explanation of Religious Communities], a translation into Persian by the Mughal courtier Muṣṭafā Khāliqdād ʿAbbāsī of the Kitāb al-Milal wa al-niḥal [The Book of Sects and Cults], the classic Arabic doxographical work by Muhammad al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153 AD).^[155] This work, commissioned by Akbar late in his reign, opens with a pledge to “divide the world by separating out beliefs [raʼy-hā] and schools of thought [madhab-hā],” not, as other texts have purportedly done, by ethnos [ṭāʼifa or ṣinf], geography [iqlīm], or law [sharīʻat].

If dīn and millat are, indeed, commensurable to “religion,” Shahrastānī’s text would appear to give a lie to the notion that it was the European West alone that applied a concept of “religion in the plural” to the known world. Indeed, references to “the world,” and “the people of the world”; verbs of cutting, partitioning, and division; and nouns expressing generic classificational categories are repeated ad nauseum in the opening sections of al-Shahrastānī’s text. The Kitāb al-Milal also potentially countermands another modern shibboleth: the argument that, in the premodern world, the categories contemporaries read as religious were, in their own context, “ethnic and civic” divisions.^[156] The Book of Sects and Creeds specifically disaggregates the study of dīn from approaches to human difference based on these categories. A principle of division based on madhhab produces a taxonomy of groups that includes Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Magians [i.e., Zoroastrians], grouped together under the heading of the genuine religions, and, on the other hand, “people of twisted opinions and futile inclinations,” such as the Philosopher, the Materialist, and the Sabian, “and the worshippers of stars and idols, and the Brahmins [barāhima].”^[157]

This division between true and false in the realm of dīn, it is important to note, does not reduce entirely to sectarian or apologetic concerns, but is rather rooted in the text’s rationalism. Religious difference is identified with reasoned discourse: disputation on “rational question[s]” and “intelligible principles.” Shahrastānī notes that, by the principle of noncontradiction, whenever there is debate within a genuine religious community [dīn or millat] on a particular point of doctrine, “truth, in the case of all questions, will be with one group.”^[158] Yet, in the parlance of J. Z. Smith, bonafide religion, here, is still not simply “our religion,” but a plural category that affords Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians basic legitimacy.

The locus classicus for such a view is the Qurʼān. Indeed, most of the groupings that Kitāb al-Milal enumerates in its opening passage, and all of the legitimate religions – the Muslims, the Magians, the Christians, and the Jews – are those recognized by Qurʼānic precedent (22:70): “Indeed, those who have believed and those who were Jews and the Sabeans and the Christians and the Magians[:] Allāh will judge between them on the Day of Resurrection.”^[159] Here, also, religious diversity is implicitly posed as a problem – albeit one that may persist until its resolution at the end of days.

A basic familiarity with this Islamic tradition of writing on religion is necessary to appreciate many of the moves the Akbarnāma makes as it frames Akbar as a tolerant king. Thus, for instance, the expansion of the ibādat-khāna – the religious debating hall – to non-Muslims is described by Abū’l Faḍl in the following way:

On the twentieth of the divine month of Mihr [the first autumn month], the flame was kindled for private interview in the midst of the interconnected assembly … Pure [wine] began to be separated from the dregs, coin from counterfeit. … Sufis, philosophers, preachers, jurists, Sunnis, Shiites, Brahmans, Jatis, Seoras, Cārbāk [i.e. cārvāka-s, the materialist philosophers mentioned in Sanskrit doxography], Christians, Jews, Sabeans [ṣābī], Magians [i.e. Zoroastrians], and various sorts of other people rejoiced in freedom from worry when they saw the calm of the imperial gathering and when they witnessed the emperor … and thus, without fear of rancorous antagonists, they revealed their secrets.^[160]

The presence, in this throng of religious friends, enemies, and others, of the “Sabeans” – the enigmatic group mentioned in the Qurʼān and in doxographical texts – may indicate an intention to invoke the aforementioned apocalyptic context of Sura 22, verse 70. Here, however, it is not God who judges between “the Jews and the Sabeans and the Christians and the Magians” at the end of days, but Akbar, the culmination of history, the Lord of the millennial Conjunction [ṣāḥib-qirān],^[161] who assesses “the truth of religious and sects” through “arguments and proofs.”^[162] It is “the world lord’s insightful search for truth,” carried out through disputation with Jesuit priests and Brahmins, according to Abū’l Faḍl, that finally unravels the riddle of religious difference.^[163]

7 Translation as Inquiry and Representation

No discussion of Akbar’s investigation into religion, of course, would be complete without mention of the sovereign’s “translation movement,” or sponsoring of renderings of Indic texts from Sanskrit to Persian. Indeed, the same Khāliqdād ʿAbbāsī mentioned above who rendered the Kitāb al-milal into Persian had also translated the Kathāsaritsāgara and the Pañcākhyāna. The products of the maktab-khāna [translation bureau or “writing-house”], while evidencing a dizzying array of diversity in translation praxis, reflect the imprint of the project described above: a religiously grounded but aspirationally impartial investigation into religious difference preoccupied with issues of statecraft and sovereignty.

A reading of this “translation movement” in the light of Akbari political theology should keep two facets in productive tension. On the one hand, the project was a form of state-sponsored inquiry, carried out according to strictures of accuracy,^[164] which although different from contemporary Anglophone standards of translation, could nevertheless be exacting. Its products were, in theory, “public”-facing, intended to educate Akbar’s Muslim and non-Muslim subjects on the scope of religious diversity in Hindūstān.^[165] On the other hand, while containing a wealth of information on Brahmanical knowledge systems, these translations also provided scaffolding for a portrayal of Akbar as not simply a sacred King but a divinized Hindūstāni sovereign. As an outgrowth of Akbar’s ambitions, the products of the translation movement functioned as instances of representational political rhetoric.^[166] Indic history and theology were fashioned into a backdrop for Akbar’s imperium – turning each, so to speak, into a mirror for the other.

This mirroring was sometimes unambiguous and direct. In a chapter of Ṭāhir Muḥammad Sabzawārī’s universal history Rauzat ut-Tāhirīn [Garden of the Chaste] consisting of extracts from Sanskrit texts, for instance, the rulers of Hind are introduced as avatars of Viṣṇu, in terms which could be read to imply an appropriation by Akbar of this role.^[167] The section begins:

In description of the Kings of Hindūstān, who, according to the belief of the Barāhama [Brahmins] of Hind, have manifested in numerous manifestations; and each manifestation is by them designated [an] “avatar”; and they say that, in that time when the riotous and wicked came to take form; the Protector of the World, for the sake of the accomplishment of [these] urgent matters, displayed the benevolence of [his] visage; and for the sake of defense against that company and the amelioration of the matter, the World Protector, the possessor of perfection, took form.^[168]

Sabzawārī’s terminology here echoes the language of “manifestation” [maẓhar] in the Akbarnāma; here, however, divine light manifests not in the Mongol bloodline but in the office of the ruler of Hind. An even more explicit translation of the doctrine of avatāra into Akbari terms takes place in another recension of the work’s introduction: God, Sabzawārī there writes, “makes every person a manifestation of the light of His own majesty and grace, in accordance with [their] aptitude and ability.”^[169] This is a (sympathetic) reading of Brahmanical theology, refashioned so to resemble Abū’l Faḍl’s Illuminationist restatement of the idea of the Perfect Man.^[170]

A similar mirroring can be observed in Sabzawārī’s treatment of the Kṛṣṇa avatar, introduced as “the greatest of the avatars [buzurgtarīn-i awatar-hā].”^[171] While in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the proximate cause of Kṛṣṇa’s incarnation is attributed to the earth’s exhaustion and grief at having to deal with warrior bands of Daityas or demons, in Sabzawārī’s text, it is introduced at first as a more general problem of unjust polity: “in that age,” he begins, “[…] every city and town was under the control of headstrong kings and impetuous rulers [wa dar ān rūzgār. har shahre u balda dar taṣarruf-i rājhā-yi sar-kash u rāyān-i khud-rā’ī būd].” Brahma, seeing the earth distressed, thus goes to Kṣīra sea, and “[makes] request for the aim and object of the earth from the True God [maqṣad u maṭlab-i zamīn rā az maʿbūd-i ḥaqīqī dar-khwāst].”^[172]

The subsequent story of the birth of Kṛṣṇa is rendered faithfully: the moment when Kṛṣṇa’s mother and father, Vasudeva and Devakī, await the birth of the Lord in prison is painted in particularly vivid terms. While the Bhāgavata Purāṇa speaks of Devakī concealing an inner illumination, which is revealed only indirectly through the brilliance of her smile, the Persian text makes her manifestly light up her environ. “They say that when Devakī became pregnant in prison,” Sabzawārī writes, “and came near to the point of giving birth, her face began to shine such that the entire prison became bright and illuminated.”^[173] The birth itself is dramatized in the following way:

When the second watch of the night, in the eighth tithi, in the month of Bhādoṅ, in the badī pakṣa, had elapsed, [the time] when Devakī would give birth drew near. The guards laid down their heads to the sleep of ignorance, and the chains fell from the hands and feet of the prisoners; and a cloud formed in the air; and the child was born from the womb of Devakī. Although he was dark-skinned, still, because of the illumination of his beauty, the whole of that jail became like a bright and radiant day. Devakī, seeing that newborn, with that appearance and virtue, said to herself, “This boy does not seem, in appearance, like the children of men. He is a possessor of perfection, manifesting in this birth.” [She] loosed her tongue in praise and veneration of him, saying, “Blessed is the mother and father upon whom the true Creator bestows children such as you.”^[174]

While the resplendence of the baby Kṛṣṇa is referenced in the Sanskrit text, it is not the primary way that the divinity of the newborn god is conveyed. In the Mughal courtly context, by contrast, the above recalls an aforementioned series of passage from the Akbarnāma, in which the miraculous impregnation of Alanquoa, the mythical progenitor of the Mongol royal bloodline, is described. Alanquoa is there an exalted being, “nourished by divine light [nūr-parward-i ilāhī],” radiating beauty and brightness, “the light of piety evident from her countenance [anwar-i khudā-shināsī az chahra-ash paidā].”^[175] She conceives in a manner compared explicitly with Mary, the Mother of Christ: in a single flash of divine light.^[176] As a result, the text tells us, “[her] abode was always bright with the splendor of that light, and from time to time it illuminated upon her externally and internally.”^[177] When Alanquoa’s relatives doubt her story, the effulgence flashes down from heaven again into her tent in a manner for all the “dark-minded [tīra-ray]” doubters to see.^[178] This light, as the court history emphasizes, became manifest most evidently and perfectly in Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar, the son of the other Mary, “Maryam-Makani.”

Other products of the translation movement manifest a similar desire to craft Indic deities and kings into figures who mirror Akbar.^[179] As I have elsewhere argued, this mirroring transformed the Sanskrit texts into a kind of speculum principum, which could exemplify ideals and ambitions but also set limits for the Akbari project. At times, the Persian renderings appear to address Akbar himself, offering him advice and cautioning him against certain excesses (such as explicit self-divinization).^[180] Despite these notes of anxiety, however, Indic theology overall became the backdrop for a (positive) political representation: an incarnational fashioning of Akbar that may have been the courtly response to an extant elite^[181] and popular^[182] desire on the part of South Asian non-Muslims to view the Mughal king as an avatar of Viṣṇu.

8 Akbar and Hindūstān: The Preface to Faiḍī’s Mahābhārat

The assimilation of Akbar to Viṣṇu (and vice versa) resulted in complex dynamics, which I cannot offer a detailed account of here. I will, however, briefly discuss the broader relation of Akbar to his kingdom, Hindūstān, as presented in an understudied section of a prominent text: the versified preface to the literary translation of the Mahābhārata produced by Abū’l Faḍl’s brother, the poet Abū'l Faiḍ bin Mubārak, or “Faiḍī.” Faiḍī’s verses not only pare particularly well with the “argument” of his brother’s preface to the Akbarnāma, examined at the beginning of this article, but also do a good job of introducing how the Hindūstāni nature of Akbar’s kingdom was dealt with by the court. In these couplets, the poet frames Hindūstān as a land of literature and learning blessed by Akbar’s enlightened leadership, with deep, occult connections to Fārs and Yūnān, Persia and Greece. Over the course of the preface, Hindūstān and Akbar gradually merge.

As in the Akbarnāma, the argument begins from a meditation on speech [sukhan]. In his initial pair of verses, Faiḍī lauds the seemingly limitless expanse [muḥīṭ] of discourse in general, and the Mahābhārata in particular, writing:

ābirū-bakhsh ceshmeh-sār-i sukhun / Āshnā-yi muḥīṭ-i bī sar ū bun

The well-spring of speech is dignifying

Acquainted with the ocean that is without beginning or end

mī kunad bā lab-i sukhan pardāz / sar guzishtī zi mulk-i hind Āghāz

Through the narrator’s lips, [Speech] carries out

the commencement [of] a tale from the country of Hind^[183]

As asserted here, it is sukhan, speech or literature itself, which is the source of the text – the author is only the instrument. Like Abū’l Faḍl, Faiḍī thus universalizes his writing to establish the broadest and most impressive stage for what will follow. Yet there is, I would suggest, a tension introduced here as well, between the theme of the beginninglessness, and therefore the universality, of speech, and that of locality: sukhan is endless, but the tale is an Indic one, which, in Faiḍī’s framing, needs some introducing. His response extends the category of sukhan – and accordingly, literary achievement and truth – to the Sanskrit text itself.

Because the prestige of the translation – and, by extension, that of Faiḍī, and his royal patron – depends upon its South Asian subject matter, the poet launches immediately into a eulogization of Hindūstān.

hind nī ʿālam-i khiradmandī / mulk-i taslīm u takht-i khursandī

Hind? Nay, the Domain of Wisdom

The Realm of Reverence, the Capital of Contentment

ān ki cashm u chirāgh ^[184] -i gardūnast / khāl-i rukhsār-i rubʿ-i maskūnast

That which is the eye and light^[185] of the celestial vault

The mole on the cheek of the inhabited quarter [of the world]^[186]

The marked locality of Hind is here quickly replaced with ideality. Hind is not merely a geographically demarcated realm, but rather a domain of spiritual and intellectual virtue. This idealized image is thereafter deepened by a comparative perspective: Hindūstān is laudable because it is comparable in these virtues to the Greeks – indeed, as Faiḍī suggests, South Asian learning was actually the source of classical wisdom:

Sākinānash ba-danish afzūnī / ṣāḥab-i nishā-yi falāṭūnī

Its inhabitants [are intent upon] the increase of knowledge / Possessing a Platonic intoxication^[187]

If the above suggests a diffusion of Greek thought into India, a few lines down, Faiḍī reverses the directionality of this exchange:

wa ān falāṭūn keh ānceh yādash būd / ṭamṭam-e hindī ūstādash būd

And that Plato, whatever he had learned / Tamtam the Indian was his teacher^[188]

Indic wisdom is, by implication of the above, responsible for the flowering of Greek thought. Ṭamṭam, or Ṭumṭum the Indian, a shadowy figure linked to magic, mathematics and astrology, first appeared in Hellenized Islamic contexts some six hundred years prior, in the writings of Muḥammad ibn Umayl al-Tamīmī (d. 960 AD).^[189] Faiḍī’s claim of epistemic primacy for Hindūstān through Ṭumṭum should not be dismissed as an odd reference in a throwaway line: It was, after all, reprised in prose, in another work attributed to the poet laureate – the Shāriq al-maʿrifat, or Shining of Gnosis – in a passage that links Plato to not only Ṭumṭum but also Vyāsa, the mythological author of the Mahabharata.^[190]

Akbar is first introduced by Faiḍī in these verses rather simply, as a King who favors the land with his presence. Thereafter, however, a slow divinization of the sovereign commences. Not only is the almanac beautified by Akbar’s particular horoscope, but he represents the perfect arrangement of time: “the [choicest] arrangement of nights and days / the most select of materials and elements.”^[191]

The exordium closes by returning to the theme introduced at the outset: that of Speech, or sukhan, as a boundless sea. The final verses, however, modify this image so as now to point to the power and praiseworthiness of Faiḍī’s imperial patron. “Of his qualities,” Faiḍī writes, “there can be no calculation/and of his expanse [muḥīṭ], no shoreline can be found.” While sukhan, as the true author of the text, was initially lauded with its familiarity with the entire ocean of discourse, the poet himself is now described as thirsty [tishna-lab], with lips desperate to drink in the whole sea [muḥīṭ-āshām].^[192] The reader is no longer quite sure, by the end, whether the subject of which Faiḍī cannot get enough is Hindūstān, Akbar, the Mahābhārata, or something that subsumes all three: a discursive merging of land, leader, and (Indic religio-historical) text through translation, which is, perhaps, the preface’s point.

9 A Key for the Lock: Translation as Theory and Practice

Both the generalized raison d’etre for Akbar’s translation bureau – the notion of translation as a powerful rubric for confronting and sublating difference – and the more esoteric idea of a lineage linking Hind, Fars, and Yunan [India, Iran, and Greece] by way of a prisca theologia – entered Akbarian state ideology through a controversial source.^[193] This was a counter-tradition termed, by its enemies, ghulū,^[194] or “exaggeration,” which, by the early modern period, had spawned a “cultic milieu”^[195] of unconventional neo-Zoroastrian Iranophilic sects embracing a series of unconventional doctrines: reincarnation, cyclical time, and a Persian supremacism anchored by a heterodox Lettrism focused on the Persian, rather than Arabic, alphabet. One of these groups, the Nuqṭawī’s or “Pointalists,” received protection from Safavid persecution in Akbar’s Hindūstān. Akbar’s realm also became a place of refuge for the followers of Ādhar Kaivān, the leader of a similar, eponymous group who was himself allegedly invited to court by Akbar and Abū’l Faḍl. While Ādhar Kaivān did not deign to visit in person, he sent a letter, in “pure Dari Persian,” which, when read backward, was Arabic, turned upside down, Turkish, and turned upside down and read backward, Hindi.^[196]

Like the Nuqṭawī’s, Ādhar Kaivān was a Lettrist sect, which claimed access to a “heavenly language,” a Persianate tongue from which all other languages descended, and in which their sacred text, the Dasātīr, was written. The Ādharis asserted as a matter of religious teaching that religious difference was nothing more than linguistic: just as all languages were offshoots of primeval Persian, all religious teachings were translations, in some extended sense, of the Dasātīr.^[197] If the Milal wa al-niḥal genre drew self-consciously from a Qurʼānic grammar of religious difference, certain portions of Dasātīr seem to be written with an eye to one-upping this Islamic precedent, fusing prophecy directly with doxography. A series of verses from the first section – a discourse attributed to Mahābād, the first prophet – thus prognosticated the emergence of various religious groups – furoh-s, in the “heavenly” language of the original, or guroh-s, in the “translation,” with references to Brahmanical sects^[198] and, in a later section, the rise of Muhammad.

The Dabistān-i madhāhib, or School of Religions, composed by a follower of this group, Mīr Dhu’l-fiqār Ādhar Sāsānī [aka Mūbad Shah] in the next century between 1645 and 1658 CE, provides an excellent exemplar of how the Islamic language of religious difference described earlier gave rise in the early modern period to a broader, Islamicate, Persophone dialect. On the one hand, Ādhar Sāsānī professes to have produced an even more impartial investigation into the essence of religion [ḥaqīqat-i dīn] than his Islamic predecessors,^[199] combining purported research into primary texts with ethnographic research. On the other hand, the religious importance his Dabistān affords to the investigation of religious differences is also something over and above that of the Kitāb al-Milal wa al-niḥal.

The religious aspect of Shahrastānī’s interest in religious diversity was avowedly apologetic: the world is to be cleared of the doubt and division sowed by Satan through reasoned investigation into different beliefs.^[200] For Ādhar Sāsānī, the operative logic is somewhat the reverse: the ability to account for religious diversity in sensitive, charitable, and positive terms is a kind of test of religious truth, one his own religion, Ādhar Kaivān, passes with flying colors. To adopt the phrasing of J. Z. Smith, the measure of the religiousness of a religion – for Sāsānī – is its interest in, and ability to parse and account for, religious diversity.

One of the most striking examples of this religious “stress-test” occurs in the opening section of the doxography, where Sāsānī reproduces the testimony of one Mūbad Khwushī, a convert to the Ādhari faith: “In the days of youth,” Khwushī begins,

I had the desire that I should attain to a spiritual guide [pīr]. Thus I approached the Shaikhs of Iran, of Tūrān, and Rūm [i.e., Greece or Rome], and Hind—Muslims, and Hindus [hunūd] and fire-worshippers [gabr] and Christians and Jews. All said to me, “Leave your own sect [kesh], enter our path.” Yet my heart was not partial to the changing of sect, and the adopting of religion, and the laying aside of rites: for none of them gave me any evident respite. … This [i.e. the appeal to change one’s faith] is the speech of the bigoted [mutaʻaṣṣib]; and [yet] each one of the Shaikhs esteemed himself to be without prejudice.^[201]

Subsequently, Mūbad Khwushī is given a vision, in which he sees a large body of water with many small tributaries. After seeking, unsuccessfully, to quench his thirst in the riverbeds, full of sediment but not much water, Khwushī is directed by his father to ask God for help. “This great sea,” an angel explains to him, “is Ādhar Kaivān; the little streams are the Shaikhs.” The sediment [lāy] and mud [gil] of the riverbanks, Mūbad Khwushī realizes, were the prejudice and envy of the sectarian leaders, which prevented him from embracing any of their faiths.^[202]

Mūbad Khwushī’s stance as an open-minded seeker, his distress at the conflicting claims of the various religions, the interchangeability or equivalence, for him, of the religions and their arguments, the sense of competition implicit in the “Shaikhs’” respective appeals to him – all these seem shockingly modern. Twentieth-century theologians spoke in similar terms to Khwushī of the challenge of religion pluralism, but generally as a novel phenomenon, a consciousness of religious diversity produced by globalization and the "enforced proximity of each religion and culture to every other.”^[203] Likewise, historians of the colonial period in South Asia, with its public religious debates between missionaries, Muslims and Hindu reformers, have remarked on “the availability of a new conceptual object called religion… known through its propositional doctrines,” and “the emergence of a new kind of subject whose job it was to decide on the truth and untruth of competing religious claims.”^[204]

It would be tempting to attribute the precociousness of the Dabistān or of the Ādhari religion to something particular to this moment in the early modern South Asian and/or Iranian context. Yet there is evidence that here – as in general – Ādhar Sāsānī was riffing on an older trope. A very similar first-personal passage, after all, occurs in a prominent sixth-century text, the early Persian translation of the Pañcatantra entitled Kalila and Dimna.^[205]

In the preface of this book, the translator, Burzoyah, describes the path that took him from a successful career as a physician at the court of the Sassanian Emperor, Khusraw Anūshirwān (d. 1579) to a full-blown existential crisis that left him grappling with the problem of human mortality and the futility of his profession. Turning to the study of religion for succor, Burzoyah encounters the problem of religious difference. “The disagreements among the nations were perfectly clear,” he remarks,

Their disagreements on the definition of the Creator and the beginning and end of things were innumerable, but everyone was convinced that he was right and the others wrong. I therefore determined to make an inquiry into what the scholars of every sect had to say about their beliefs and doctrines and thereby try to gain a satisfactory foothold. When I persisted in my efforts and research I found that every nation had much to say about the preference for their own religion and the superiority of their own sect and spent a lot of time vilifying opposing creeds and anathematizing their opponents. In no way did I find anything helpful to me […]^[206]

Burzoyah’s narrative culminates – as many do – in a trip to Hindūstān, where he participates in many “discussions and … deliberations,” and brings back “many books” – including the Pañcatantra, which he subsequently translates under the patronage of Anūshirwān.^[207]

Burzoyah’s statement closely resembles another case closer to hand: the figure of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Akbar – the Perfect Man, World-Emperor and sacred King par excellence. A speech of Akbar’s from the time of the aforementioned expansion of the ibādat-khāna, recorded by Jesuit visitors to the Mughal court, reprises many of the same sentiments as the Sassanian physician:

[Akbar] said, ‘I perceive that there are varying customs and beliefs of varying religious paths. For the teachings of the Hindus, the Musalmans, the Jazdini, the Jews and the Christians are all different. But the followers of each religion regard the institutions of their own religion as better than those of any other. Not only so, but they strive to convert the rest as to their own way of belief. If these refuse to be converted, they not only despise them, but also regard them for this very reason as their enemies. And this causes me to feel many serious doubts and scruples. [Therefore] I desire that on appointed days the books of all the religious laws be brought forward, and that the doctors meet together and hold discussions, so that I may hear them, and that each one may determine which is the truest and mightiest religion.’^[208]

For those unpersuaded by Jesuits, there is no need to take their word for it. Even Akbar’s intimate enemy, Badāʾūnī, does not attribute all of the former’s religious faults to cynicism, pride, or bad influence: “the Emperor,” he writes, “was possessed of an excellent disposition, and was an earnest searcher after truth, but very ignorant and a mere beginner.”^[209] As a result of this naivete, but also because of a “peculiar acquisitiveness,” a “conviction” took hold of the King “that there are wise men to be found and ready at band in all religions, and men of asceticism and recipients of revelation and workers of miracles among all nations, and that the Truth is an inhabitant of every place.”^[210]

There is no way, of course, to peer inside the mind of a long-dead Mughal King. It is for this reason – the feeling that history should move from speculation about “personal religious inclinations” to, as Carl Ernst terms it, “a more realistic analysis of policy aspects”^[211] that the figure of Akbar as one with a religious interest in the question of religious difference has been sidelined. By reminding the reader of the preponderance of this “romantic” narrative in the sources, I mean to underscore two points: First, that the question of Akbar’s motivations – cynical, sincere, or mixed – is a question that the sources themselves implicitly or explicitly answer, and so part of the data that must be taken into account; and second, that part of the contemporary disinclination to take Islamicate narratives of the search for religious truth among the religions [adyān] seriously – particularly when they concern a King – derives from a disaggregation of the religious from the political.

By way of conclusion, I would suggest that Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar investigated other faiths, met with fakirs, Sheikhs, and Jesuits and sponsored interreligious debates and translations of Sanskrit texts, not because he held all their positions to be valid from a position of disinterested “tolerance,” but because he wanted earnestly to determine their degree of differentiation and truth. In his own words, he sought the “key …which has been lost”^[212] and found it in a meta-theology that exalted translation and philosophical and metaphysical investigation [taḥqīq] over devotion to convention and tradition [taqlid].^[213] The “world lord’s insightful search for the truth” – as Abū’l Faḍl again put it – was not, however, simply a private, “romantic” reality, religious in the contemporary sense: it was one element of a political theology, the key to his secular and sacred authority alike. For his hagiographers, Akbar’s ability to find as well as search for truth was proof of his eschatological significance and granted him special authority – including the right to a kind of extended ius reformandi.

This political theology did, in its practical outcroppings, encourage “tolerance” in the accustomed modern sense with respect to non-Islamic faiths. Its anchoring element, however, as I hope I have been able to demonstrate, was not a devotion to neutrality as a trans-metaphysical ethical ideal, but an appreciation of religious difference as a weighty religious question requiring charity and intelligence. The Islamicate tradition of writing on religion in the plural [adyān or madhāhib] was theologically and metaphysically grounded and was not, so to speak, neutrally neutral; indeed, to its enemies, it was not necessarily so tolerant at all.^[214]

While the so-called “Mughal translation movement’s” treatments of Indic texts were laborious and serious, they also had a way of carving up alien theologies along studied lines of interpretation. The theological contents of Sanskrit texts were generally assimilated into a capacious, broadly neo-Platonic Islamicate cosmology in which, for instance, gods such as Brahma appeared as subsidiary entitles under a supreme deity, and fantastical events were speculated to have occurred in some age of the jinn before the creation of Adam.^[215] Similarly, the Ādhari author of the Dabistān-i madhāhib combined a rhetoric of tolerance for all religious traditions with a rationalizing or demythologizing principle according to which nothing contrary to reason would be affirmed. The tension between these two principles – tolerance and rationalism – was reconciled by an interpretative criterion that treated as symbolic or didactic anything that did not seem plausible within Ādhari metaphysics and cosmology: myths of struggles against demons were thus, for instance, interpreted as struggles against the passions, and the Viṣṇu avatars analogized to divine names or qualities.^[216]

While these translational departures from “the original” have often been understood by contemporary scholars as distortions testifying to the scholarly and philosophical limitations of their authors,^[217] I would beg to differ. This metaphysics proceeded not from prejudice or partiality, but from a reasoned consideration of what sort of entities do and do not exist. Entire subject areas in the modern academy attempted and still attempt to “translate” mythos into history according to a similar method. Ongoing work on the “historical Jesus,” for instance, re-interprets a handful of two-thousand-year-old accounts of an apocalyptic miracle worker in Palestine to produce a variety of subject-portraits, all in harmony with naturalistic assumptions. However defunct in the present, Max Muller’s idea of the “disease of language” and reinterpretation of all myth as solar myth pairs well, so to speak, with Ādhar Sāsānī’s reinterpretation of all prominent holy sites as survivals of ancient astrological cults. Indeed, in broader terms, the entire enterprise of the history of religions – or of history more broadly – can be characterized as a project of rationalization: a process by which “minority histories,” with their indigestible gods and miracles, are translated into a flattened, scientized time horizon.^[218] If contemporary scholars of religion are not willing to depart from the metaphysical and political orthodoxies of their own time in interpreting other peoples’ religions, they cannot very well fault a convinced member of a precolonial esoteric sect or a Mughal sovereign for instantiating a similar tendency. Truth, after all, does not contradict truth.

10 Conclusion: Waiting for a Conuigator?

It is nothing but a modern folly to try to alter a corrupt moral organization by altering its political constitution and code of laws without changing the religion… At best it is only a temporary expedient—when it is obviously too great a task to descend into the depths of the religious spirit and to raise that same spirit to its truth—to seek to separate law and justice from religion. Hegel, Encyclopaedia §552^[219]

In his Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League (1930), the Urdu poet and political philosopher Muhammad Iqbal addressed the paucity in British India of any basis for what Carl Schmitt would have termed “substantial equality”^[220] – i.e., some axis of difference on which Indians could be said to differ from non-Indians and on the grounds of which unity and nationality could be affirmed. According to Iqbal, most of the options for solidarity were simply not extant. India lacked any “common race-consciousness,” spanning too much land and too many diverse peoples^[221]; religious diversity posed a serious issue as well, both because of the lack of homogeneity within Hinduism and since Islam made its own political claims on Muslims. “Islam is not a Church,” Iqbal declared, but “a State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing.”^[222] The only hope of preserving India would be to implement a federated structure of relatively homogenous states, sutured together by a modus vivendi.

In one passage, however, Iqbal allows himself to consider a counter-factual – could India ever have been one nation? The answer, surprisingly, is yes:

[Such unity] might have been a fact in India if the teaching of Kabir and the Divine Faith of Akbar had seized the imagination of the masses of this country. Experience, however, shows that the various caste units and religious units in India have shown no inclination to sink their respective individualities in a larger whole. Each group is intensely jealous of its collective existence.^[223]

Given that Iqbal has already addressed the undesirability of imposing a single religious outlook on the subcontinent, it is likely that the sort of “teaching” and “faith” he has in mind here is a theology of religions: a meta-religious outlook^[224] that could have helped to mediate and sublate religious difference, rather than dissolve it completely.

Akbar’s popularity in scholarly, popular and political literature over the last century and a half is a testament to the continued political importance of his myth. Indeed, the speech of Iqbal’s quoted above has been reproduced recently by the historian Manan Ahmed, whose Loss of Hindūstān (2020), somewhat like Amartya Sen’s earlier The Argumentative Indian (2004), holds up the Mughals in mourning the withering away of the image of a “neutral” and tolerant South Asian polity.^[225]

The continued political importance of Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar recalls an earlier claim of Ashis Nandy: that Indian secularists, in moments of crisis, failure, or ernstfall, look back to “theolog[ies] of tolerance” implicit or explicit in “Sufi and Bhakti poetry, medieval saints …, and names from history like Ashoka, [and] Akbar” to level against the Orientalist, Hindu nationalist, or illiberal/antisecularist enemy.^[226] In this essay, I have attempted to clarify Akbar’s legend and the political meaning of his myth – somewhat as Schmitt did with the myth of the Leviathan in his Leviathan or with political theology itself in Political Theology II. “Until the Day of Judgement,” Schmitt wrote in Political Theology II,

the Augustinian teaching on the two kingdoms will have to face the twofold open question: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur? [‘Who will decide? Who will interpret?’] Who answers in concreto, on behalf of the concrete, autonomously acting human being, the question of what is spiritual, what is worldly and what is the case with the res mixtae, which, in the interval between the first and the second arrival of the Lord, constitute, as a matter of fact, the entire earthly existence of this spiritual-worldly, spiritual-temporal, double-creature called a human being?^[227]

Akbar, according to his hagiographers, was the exemplary case of a “spiritual-temporal, double-creature”: a Perfect Man [insān-i kāmil] reflecting and mediating divinity to human beings, and a divine Word made master of the hermeneutico-ontological domain. This portraiture, as I have argued, appears eminently compatible with Schmitt’s (admittedly fragmentary) thoughts on how to flesh out a positive sense of the state’s “totality”: i.e., as he writes, in “the ‘temporal divinity’ that Hegel ascribes to the leading people in world history,” which exemplifies the idea of “finite infinity” and the mediation between “immanence and transcendence.”^[228]

In the preceding sections, I have attempted not so much to provide a complete description of Akbari political theology – a perilous task – as to provide enough of a picture from my own readings of relevant primary sources to make a convincing argument for what this political theology did not consist in: i.e., either a precocious Rawlsian Liberal neutrality in the rough, or a totalism which would mandate the elimination of heterogeneity. Akbar’s polity, I propose, is a horse of a different color: a pre-modern form of integral “secularism” (avant-la-lettre) that stands equidistant both from Carl Schmitt and from his enemies, and which can, in the ongoing quarrel between liberal and illiberal parties in the era of another crisis of democracy and state, help to clarify our understandings of both.

By the way of conclusion, I will speculatively sketch two generalized contrasts between Akbar’s “millennial sovereignty” as I understand it, and Carl Schmitt’s “political theology” and broader intellectual project. These are meant, of course, in a constructive spirit: not as attempts to foreclose future forays into Mughal political theology, but as provocations and/or serious objections to my own arguments intended to stimulate response from students of Schmitt and South Asia more knowledgeable than I.

The first involves a difficulty with political theology as a descriptive or “sociological” methodology, and the way it deals with pluralism and difference. As theorized by Schmitt, political theology conventionally assumes a fixed backdrop of metaphysics or theology that determines the structure of concepts of political authority for a given period and region. However, in the milieu of an early modern Islamicate South Asia characterized by a diversity of cultural and political expressions, the historian does not find any correspondently fixed or monolithic backdrop. Rather, in the texts I read, worlds and images of the world – ecumenes, epistemes – collide, commingle, and merge.

As I again suggest, it is this pluralism and openness that allowed for Akbar’s innovations in the political sphere. Akbar’s “translation project” was arguably an attempt to encourage and direct the process, to broaden an awareness of the degree of diversity within South Asia. The (potentially disorienting) apprehension of difference was meant to inspire faith in Akbar as an empowered sacred being and religious seeker, with a character and intellect uniquely equipped to sensitively interpret, manage, and, to some extent, transcend this troubling difference. Yet however troubling, pluralism here served as an advertisement, not an obstacle – a situation difficult to apprehend in Schmitt’s terms.

The second issue I want to raise is related not only to the first but also to a generalized objection that could be posed against my freewheeling way of dealing with the master categories of “religion” and “state.” In an essay titled The Age of Neutralizations and De-politicizations (1929), Carl Schmitt writes the following:

All concepts of the spiritual sphere, including the concept of spirit, are pluralistic in themselves and can only be understood in terms of concrete political existence. Just as every nation has its own concept of nation and finds the constitutive characteristics of nationality within itself, so every culture and cultural epoch has its own concept of culture. All essential concepts are not normative but existential. If the center of intellectual life has shifted in the last four centuries, so have all concepts and words.^[229]

At first glance, Schmitt here seems to say something rather shocking, even in terms internal to his thought. His thesis in the above appears to expose a rift between the “descriptive,” Weberian vision of political theology set out in the Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber, and his later, openly eschatological vision of a political theology-cum-“political Christology.” As György Geréby argues, Schmitt’s adoption of a “conceptual-sociological” approach seems on its face to deny the hermeneutic of continuity, which is the sine qua none for tradition. A division of history into “monads of time period” makes comparison between epochs a perilous task.^[230] If “all concepts and words” undergo a sea change as the concrete order of society shifts, then translation across epochs would seem an impossible prospect. “Religion” in the twentieth century would mean something very different than “religion” in the nineteenth.

Such a perspective poses an even bigger problem for the comparison of political ideas. Any juxtaposition between Schmitt or Hobbes’ political treatises and Abū’l Faḍl’s writings on Akbar belies significant discontinuities between the concrete situation in a European nation-state and that in an early-modern South Asian empire. This problem is, of course, a hoary one. It can partially be addressed by anthropological approaches to sovereignty which blur the division or by theories such as Seth Richardson’s of the “presumptive state” – i.e., that, even so far back as six thousand years ago, premodern “states” aspired to powers of “integrative sovereign authority” which they did not actually and/or consistently possess.^[231] It is not certain, however, if that – or any other response – could fully meet Carl Schmitt’s challenge.

Yet while it is undeniably hyperbolic and historicist in outlook, it is obvious even from the essay’s immediate context that Schmitt does not mean to deny the possibility of trans-historical terms and categories – the aforementioned passage, after all, employs them – or of understanding the “essential concepts” of other centuries – the essay goes on, after all, to describe and compare, in the twentieth-century Deutsch, the “central domains” that governed various epochs of European history. Read in a different spirit, I take the essay to inspire a helpful way forward.

As the philosopher Donald Davidson has argued, “we make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement,” and thereby “englar[ge] the basis of shared (translatable) language or of shared opinion.”^[232] Doing so does not explode the possibility of difference, but lays the groundwork for meaningful disagreement. In the same way, I would suggest that the historian should not, as Brent Nongbri and others have done, put up a wall of incommensurability between “our” religion or politics and theirs, insisting that we cannot translate terms even in the face of apparent family resemblance. This strategy has a way of sealing us within the homogenous, empty time of our own dismal epoch. Rather, just as Schmitt insists that every “culture… has its own concept of culture,” we should insist that each religion has its own concept of religion, and each polity or political project its own concept of authority and community. Many “religions” – i.e., those discourses and traditions that show up to us as “religions” in the present – took some stock of religious others, finding their own bases for comparison and accordingly for (outward-facing) identity. Some – as I believe is the case in the case of Islam – actively cultivated a sense of religion as a question. It is in this spirit – one of, as Wendy Doniger once put it, “compar[ing] ourselves as comparativists” with others who had also translated and compared – that the historian of political theology should engage with Akbar’s example, and the challenging questions it continues to pose.^[233]