The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari ...

FORMATION OF THE AKBARI DISPENSATION 161
in His grace has bestowed on me such power that if I wish I can, with a single letter, cause
the Chinese emperor who claims divinity to abandon his monarchy and come running over
thorns to my threshold. But with all this power I await God’s command: whenever
He wills, His command reaches me and is executed’. 75
Later Naqshbandi Ahrari shaikhs, who had a strong memory of a
share in power, would then have found it difficult to adjust to a political
environment where the king did far more than simply assert his sole
authority. Akbar, for example, had the audacity to throw overboard
the shaikh’s recommendation, and that too when it came from a scion
of the great Naqshbandi lineage. Quite noticeably, therefore, Akbar
moved away from the Naqshbandis. The emperor had lately begun
to see the seeds of a formidable challenge to his plan for power and
political preeminence in the activities of several supporters of the
Naqshabandi lineage at the court of his half-brother Mirza Hakim,
in Kabul. A glimmering of these sentiments is evident from events in
the 1580s. While his nobles and deputies were assigned the task of
suppressing serious rebellions. In Gujarat and the east, Akbar, himself,
commanded the expedition to deal with Mirza Hakim in the Punjab. 76
We will see below that Kabul served as the centre for relaunching
the Naqshbandi order in India, even after the termination of Mirza
Hakim’s regime.
In the late 1570s Akbar had favoured the Chishti order. This is
not to suggest that the Chishti saints’ concerns were purely spiritual,
with no taste whatsoever for power and politics. Their past too had
seen cases of their conflict with rulers. 77 A significant feature of their
politics had, however, been their support to rulers in their endeavour
to adjust the nature of Muslim power to the Indian environment. 78
Again, no Chishti shaikh ever amassed wealth comparable to that
of Khwaja Ahrar, with a mission to reform a political regime, reward
those who would listen to his exhortations and become submissive, and
punish the ones who dared act independently. On the contrary, the
75 Cited in Algar ‘The Naqshbandi order: A preliminary survey of its history and
significance’ in Studia Islamica, Vol.44 (1976), pp. 123–52. Emphasis mine.
76 Subrahmanyam, ‘A note on the Kabul Kingdom’; Faruqui, ‘The Forgotten
Prince’.
77 Digby, ‘The Sufi Shaykh and the Sultan: A conflict of claims to authority’ in
Iran, Vol.27 (1990), pp. 71–81; Sunil Kumar, ‘Assertions of authority: A study of
the discursive statements of two Sultans of Delhi’ in M. Alam, F.N. Delvoye and M.
Gaborieau (eds.), The Making of Indo-Persian Culture: Indian and French Studies (Delhi:
Manohar, 2000), pp. 37–65.
78 For a discussion around this question, see Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political
Islam: India 1200–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 81–114.
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 15 Feb 2011 IP address: 129.174.97.34