Pakistan, A Forgotten Dream:

The Search for a Lost Nation

Part I: Politics & History

By

Muhammad Umer

Nonfiction Literature

Contents

Part I. Politics & History

Introduction

Author’s Note

Chapter One: The Seeds of Islam, 610-1857

Chapter Two: Rise and Fall - The British Raj, 1858-1947

Chapter Three: A Nation Orphaned, 1947-1958

Chapter Four: The Revolution, 1958-1988

Chapter Five: A Den of Thieves, 1988-1999

Chapter Six: Third Martial Law, 1999-2008

Chapter Seven: A Den of Thieves II, 2008- 2018

Chapter Eight: A New Pakistan, 2018-2019

Chapter Nine: 2020 & Beyond

Postscript

Introduction

Perusing through the mounds of books available at our fingertips, one may find asking themselves, why read anything on Pakistan? A barren wasteland overrun by militancy as according to most media portrayals, it may not seem much from the surface, aside from a hellish land nosediving towards its imminent collapse.

Briefly, Pakistan is many things. It is a country located in South Asia composed of less than a percentage of the world’s land mass, while also the fifth-largest population on the planet, landscapes stretching from sandy beaches and deserts to lush green farmlands and snowy Himalayan peaks, with a geographical location ripe for international trade. It is a country whose citizens, cut from a deeply diverse cloth, stretching from the direct descendants of Africans in Sindh to Tibetans in the far north, have led their teams to clinch victories to enshrine their names in the hallowed halls of sporting history –still, nothing too fascinating, a country like many others.

Yet from within, Pakistan is a complicated nation of contradictions, facing issues which may seem as paradoxes; it holds an abundance of mineral reserves in gold and copper beneath its grounds, along with natural resources ranging from gas, petroleum to coal, and the world’s largest irrigation network, yet the country remains indebted and burdened to foreign creditors and monetary organizations, due to a political history more captivating and cutthroat than perhaps any other established democracy one may find of its electoral size, whose prime actors rule over an overall poor nation that maintains the world’s sixth-largest military force, and formally declared its possession of nuclear arms decades ago.

Some of these paradoxes can be attributed to external factors, such as the country’s immediate neighbors in the east and northwest, (India and Afghanistan) who have sought to aggressively pin it down since its own inception, with the former creating a conflict just as crippling and difficult to resolve as many of the major disputes plaguing the middle east or Korea, all whilst Pakistanis are subjected to being bombed and ridiculed by their own allies, criticized for not doing enough to fight militancy, despite losing tens of thousands of lives to it, along with billions in resources in the process. As a partial result of these paradoxes, although established on democratic principles, the country has transitioned through periods of military rule almost half as long as its existence.

Internally, these paradoxes have been the result of an inward confusion towards reconciling with the country’s own founding ideals, which have been claimed as either secular or religious principles, depending who you ask, yet Pakistan has truly resembled neither –instead a country so desperate for effective leadership that at times, while plummeting towards collapse, military dictatorships have been the preferred alternative to the people than democratic choice.

In my research to practically propose solving what ails this purportedly democratic state, derived purely through finding the principles on which the country was really founded on from their original sources, I discovered a remarkably dynamic, revolutionary ideal behind the creation of this country –one which I think, has scarcely been replicated elsewhere in the world on such a level, largely overlooked, yet with the potential to solving the democratic, economic, spiritual, and social issues plaguing Pakistan –and perhaps even other Muslim states across the globe.

As the Islamic world has remained lulled and misunderstood in an era where scientific achievements have pushed the boundaries of human civilization to its greater fringes, this ideal becomes all the more urgently pressing to be expounded on and applied as practical policy, and for Pakistan in particular, who must quickly find both itself and its seat in the modern world as it faces a political crossroads, placed in the middle of a showdown of superpowers between its all-weather ally China and the United States, all while the country itself inches closer to a nuclear conflict with its neighbor, India, which has begun witnessing a transformative period of reflection of its own under the rulership of a Hindu nationalist, openly jingoistic government.

Hoping to reanalyze the facets of this deeply misunderstood country in a more authentic yet candid light, one which takes into account its own narratives, this book differs from many others on the topic, as it not only explains how this ideal came into being and the story of what went wrong in Pakistan, but also takes together these elements to draw up a practical, tangible path the country can follow to lift itself up by its bootstraps and reclaim the original ideals it was established on, forming a far superior, enduring nation ready to tackle the issues of the 21^st century and beyond.

Essentially, it is a humble attempt to reconstruct something –by putting together the pieces of a Pakistan that is, to construct an image of a Pakistan that never was, and remains, a forgotten dream.

Author’s Note

      I’d like now to briefly explain the format of this work. For easier reading, it is composed of two parts, each of which is a separate book. Part one deals with politics and history, two very intertwining subjects. This book briefly traces the history of the roots of Pakistan, from the sands of the Hijaz and Muhammad ibn al-Qasim’s military sojourn into Southern Punjab, to the illustrious Mughals and Pakistan’s formation as the first modern self-professed Muslim-majority state from the ashes of British colonialism, and all that has gone wrong since.

Part 2, Society and Culture, is essentially a discussion on how Pakistan’s worsening political situation has impacted its society and culture.

Pakistani society, defined by its internal workings, both social and cultural, helps reveal how a diverse identity does not necessarily mean confrontation and impossible coexistence (contrary to what many Western narrations on the country would have you believe), what role religion can possibly play given its importance, why certain ideologies have failed, (particularly leftism in Pakistan) and how the military’s relationship with its civilians and deepened political role may have been exacerbated by the hand of the very society who chose to turn to increasingly unscrupulous leaders. This book is not an all-encompassing overview of the themes it presents, but is rather composed of relevant observations that push towards a greater whole. In short, it takes these varied facets of Pakistani life to draw together what I believe may be a solution to solve Pakistan’s many worries. As it also takes from Pakistani history’s impact on the development of Pakistani culture and society as we know it, I would like to point out that the final chapter of part two is the true conclusion to both parts of this work.

I.

Politics & History

Chapter 1.

The Seeds of Islam, 610-1857

“Islam appeared as a protest against idolatry. And what is patriotism but a subtle form of idolatry; a deification of a material object”

- Muhammad Iqbal

Among the tens of billions who have straddled across the hemispheres of our planet unknown, but a fraction of a percent of them have stood exceptionally from the rest. Few are these souls who have altered the events of history for better or for worse, their lives producing so profound an impact that they maintain relevance in the pages of history eons after their physical remnants have become bone and dust. Deep in the inhospitable desert sands of the Hejaz, touching the tropical Red Sea and across modern Egypt and Sudan, after a 40-year old Muhammad ibn Abdullah[1] emerged one night from the lonely caves of Mecca to announce himself a divinely-appointed Prophet sent to salvage the fate of the world, hardly any amongst his own kin populating the city’s merchant elite would surmise that Muhammad would be among human civilization’s remembered few, or even counted as a footnote of history. Purely from an anthropological view of history, by Muhammad’s declaration in the early 600s, the state of the world had become one swaying “on the verge of chaos”; the great ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, tangling their basis of unity on unstable foundations wrapped in coercion and animosity, had now brought the world “ready to fall to pieces” despite their great contributions to humanity, their imminent collapse threatening to decline the world order backwards into barbaric tribalism. As the ways of the ancients began failing, a new source of unity was necessitated, one distant from the unity tied through hereditary rulers or kin, moving past sparkling thrones and “the elaborate ceremonials of priesthood”. Arabia, where Muhammad had declared himself a Prophet, may have been potent grounds for this change, as Arabian society had remained largely unchanged by the great ancients, retaining “unbelievable savagery and cruelty.” Although a simple lifestyle shaped by the cruel winds of the desert, these Arabs had based their loyalties along tribal lines, warping their culture to revolve around depraved rituals and blood-feuds –observed purely from the yardstick of human progress, the scale of Muhammad’s impact on altering the trajectory of this barbaric civilization would be remarkable.[2] Stripping away ceremonial practices, the order of priesthood and the principles of ascetism, Muhammad had challenged the Arabian system of tribal and ethnic loyalties through proposing a simple message of unity under the service of a single God, enshrining a spiritual system consisting of religious teachings through both a series of divine revelations passed down to Muhammad, (compiled as the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book) and compilations of his own traditions (the Sunnah), to form the basic foundations of Islam. To ensure this spiritual system was maintained and materialized, Muhammad drafted a constitution to this effect, which formed the basis of an Islamic state, fit with its own tools of statecraft such as a system of laws and tax collection, social restrictions, on which it enshrined the rights of women and minorities as according to its own religious values. Emerging victorious after a series of battles with the tribal elite and striking political alliances, by the time of his death in 632, Muhammad had established “a universal brotherhood composed of all men of every race who would accept this God”, successfully convincing a majority of the surrounding tribes of the Peninsula to abandon their racial and societal divisions and unite under the banner of his teachings.[3]

Four of his closest confidants led the Islamic state successively as Caliph (successor to Muhammad), composing the Rashidun Caliphate. By the time the fourth Caliph, Ali, assumed the mantle in 656, a series of conquests had spread the fringes of the Islamic state’s borders considerably, stretching from northern Africa and Persia to portions of central and southern Asia. The administration of the four caliphs had followed Muhammad’s traditions closely, electing their leaders through a democratic process of ‘social consultation’, electing their leaders on the consensus of the community, and formulating their laws and practices based on their understanding of religious teachings. However, the position of the caliphate itself remained beleaguered with external and internal security threats; splinter groups claimed themselves prophets and waged war on the caliphate, and nearly all four Caliphs died at the hands of assassins, with Uthman (the third Caliph) reigning longest for a period of 12 years. During his reign, Uthman had made a fateful decision which would give way to far-reaching consequences, by appointing large amounts of his kin to positions within the administration, such as Muawiyah, his governor of Syria. Assassinated by unknown rebels, Uthman’s death sparked controversy in the Islamic world, as Ali, his successor who was handed the thanklessly impossible task of bringing them to justice, was erroneously blamed by Uthman’s powerful supporters for failing to pursue the assassins, lighting off Islam’s first civil war. The peace surmised was a fleeting one, because after Ali himself was assassinated by rebels in 661, his son Hasan was seen as the elected fifth Caliph, though once more Muawiyah would rise his armies against him, and wishing to promote unity, Hasan signed a treaty, agreeing to quickly step down as Caliphate for the greater good. As Caliph, while enacting sweeping reforms strengthening the efficiency of the administration, Muawiyah failed to repair the ranks of discord from within, and by placing his own son as successor, finally overturned the Islamic State’s values of democratic succession, turning the seat of the elected Caliphate into an absolute monarchy, firstly under his own empire, the Umayyad Caliphate, though the more ardent groups dissatisfied with Ali’s progeny being sidelined from succession established their own sect within Islam, known as Shiism.

Scimitars and Sails

Known by a variety of names; to the Greeks as ‘India’ after the Indus river; the Persians as ‘Hindustan’, and later the Arabs as ‘Al-Hind’, Muhammad’s religion had first touched the lands of the south Asian subcontinent within his own lifetime, initially through merchants and missionaries who helped establish its first Mosque along the shoresides of Kerala in 629, reportedly under the patronage of a Hindu King who had converted to Islam.[4] Throughout the Rashidun Caliphate this mostly continued, with Arab merchants regularly visiting shoreside towns for trade remaining the most significant power behind Islam’s expansion in the subcontinent. Although change was not new to the subcontinent, which had witnessed a variety of rulers and empires (first Buddhists, later Hindus and Jains) warring over territorial control, in the subcontinent particularly, Islam posed a unique challenge, threatening the socioreligious hierarchy of existing religions, mainly of Hinduism’s relics of ascetism and caste divisions which permanently confined the lower class to a life of misery –Islam’s ‘universal brotherhood’ offered such groups economic mobility and social feasibility. Eventually, Arab traders and the later missionaries began settling in coastal areas, including Sindh, Gujrat and the Bengal, influencing the conversion of the local population. For the Islamic state, its initial goals of expanding in the subcontinent were for attaining “effective naval control of Indian Ocean trade routes”, and the second Rashidun Caliph, Umar, secured the coast of Makran, proving “invaluable for the Arab navy to patrol the sea lane”, though Uthman, not wishing to venture deeper into Makran’s “forbidding and uncongenial nature”, or “the ferocity of its people”, halted the expansion near “the west bank of the Indus Delta”. As the state expanded considerably under the Umayyads to reach much of northern Africa, Spain and Portugal, touching France, in its eastern shores, the Arabs were forced to revisit the impasse, where neighboring Sindh had become a hotbed of instability and anarchy, with pirates attacking trade routes, plundering merchants incoming from Persia and the Arabian Gulf into the port of Debal in southern Sindh. The continuous attacks serving as “a constant threat to a flourishing inter-regional trading network extending from Persia to Sri Lanka”, the Umayyad Governor Al-Hajjaj viewed the only solution would be to invade Sindh, the “gateway” to Hindustan.

In 712, after the Sindhi King Raja Dahir rejected Hajjaj’s requests for “action against the pirates” who had captured Muslim women and children, Hajjaj, handed his “casus belli”, sent his in his strapping seventeen-year old military commander, Muhammad bin Qasim for the job, who conquered Debal as a Muslim settlement, marking the moment by replacing its Buddhist temple with a mosque. Chasing down the King through striking political alliances with Hindu rulers, Qasim conquered Sindh through to “Multan in the far north”.[5] With internal politics forcing Qasim to turn back and end his campaign, the success of the conquest had now meant that Muslim expansion was no longer confined to secure naval routes, signaling the start of Islam’s political presence in the subcontinent. However, the expansion could go no further than Sindh, which the Umayyads continued ruling directly until 750, at which point the Abbasids, (a group claiming descent from Muhammad’s uncle) successfully rebelled, replacing the Umayyads as Caliph and shifting the center of power to Baghdad, the site that would later serve as the center of Islam’s ‘Golden Age’, where Muslims embarked on major breakthroughs through artistic adventures, scientific innovations and geographical explorations, ultimately helping establish the basis for Europe’s Renaissance. In Sindh, however, they lost power to the increasingly independent local Arab administrators, who pushed the Abbasids out of power altogether by the late 800’s, thereafter invoking loyalty to the Caliphate nominally. Autonomous Arab rule would be short-lived, falling to the sword of Mahmud of Ghazni, a Turkic warlord who after spearheading numerus campaigns beginning in 1001, extinguished Arab rule in the subcontinent by 1025, establishing the Ghaznavid empire, which at its greatest extent stretched from Persia through Kabul and past Lahore.[6] Like many of his predecessors, (Hindu, Muslim or otherwise) Mahmud gathered funds for military campaigns by raiding temples, (such as the Somnath) and destroyed places of worship deemed to represent the political strongholds of the past, erecting mosques to signify the changes in the political landscape –he was not original in employing this tactic, which held the dual effect of symbolically marking the presence of a new power in the region and its dominance. What Mahmud’s legacy ultimately suffered from, was that both the Hindu and Muslim Turco-Persians scholars of that era, in an effort to either demonize or heroize him, saw fit to distort the numbers killed and temples destroyed under his rule, since most of these inflated claims were subsequently disproven through modern archeological findings.[7]

After Mahmud died in 1030, his empire lingered on until being usurped by Muhammad of Ghor, founder of the Ghurid dynasty, in 1186, who further stretched Muslim rule, establishing control over the entire north of the subcontinent into Delhi, and eventually reaching Bengal. By taking Delhi, Ghor had established Muslim rule in the center of the subcontinent, though after his assassination in 1206 with no sons to succeed him, the empire divided itself amongst his generals into smaller sultanates, one of which was ruled by a ‘slave’[8], Qutb al-Din Aibak. On a quest to revive the empire, the skilled general made his way from Delhi to retake portions of the sultanates including Lahore, forming the Delhi Sultanate. Aibak transformed the face of Delhi by imprinting it a center of Muslim power, politically and culturally, laying the foundations of future Islamic heritage sites such as the Qutb Minar complex, though it would be his successor, Iltutmish, who ultimately cemented this dream as Sultan, ruling directly from Delhi where he revived the crumbling empire, finally capturing the smaller sultanates, the entirety of the north, reaching the fringes of Kabul in the west and Tibet in the east. Back in the seat of Muslim power, in 1258 the Abbasid Caliphate felt a shockwave; the Mongol horde had sacked Baghdad, drowning this center of enlightenment in blood, terminating its golden age and severely weakening the caliphs who fled for Cairo, only to fall under the influence of another slave dynasty, the Mamluks. The Mongol injection would electrify the subcontinent; while Iltutmish ensured the longevity of the empire through expansion and administrative reforms, and completed the Qutb complex to establish Delhi as a capital of pristine Islamic culture, his death in 1236 was followed by a continuously weak succession, and destruction at the hands of a Mongol invasion in the northwest, leaving the Sultanate to be usurped by another dynasty in 1290, the Turko-Afghan Khaljis. The fresh blood injected new life, expanding the limits of the sultanate deeper towards the south in the Deccan, Sindh in the west, and Kashmir in the north. Although influenced by a rich mix of Persian and central Asian culture, the Delhi Sultans continued the traditionally Islamic governing practices of the Arabs, such as imposing separate taxes on non-Muslim subjects for the state’s defense and security (Jizya). The Mongol invasion was finally upended by the early 1300’s, though the Khalji dynasty fell to a group of Turkic rulers operating under the banner of the Tughlaq dynasty, who pushed the sultanate under Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq to span over much of the subcontinent aside from the Vijayanagara Empire in south.

Deep amongst the warlords of central Asia where Genghis’ descendants had settled, taking Islam as their faith while maintaining their warring, turbulent nomadic life, a new power was rising. Weakened by the late 1300s, the Delhi Sultanate was invaded by one of these warring nomads, a Turco-Mongol general named Timur, who, (although a Turk) like many of his contemporaries in the field of war and destruction, was deeply motivated by Genghis, and sought to ‘recreate’ his successes through conquests just as bloodthirsty and ruthless. Timur invaded the sultanate in 1398, sacking and massacring along the Indus, taking Multan, and finally, in mere days, the glittering diamond of Delhi, plundering the city of its great riches and drowning its residents in blood; slaughtering Hindus and Muslims with equal bloodlust, “very few were spared” from his hordes of mass destruction, and Timur returned to Samarkand along with “Delhi’s finest craftsmen and builders”, who fashioned his beloved capital into a work of unrivaled beauty and splendor, becoming “the queen of Central Asian cities”. Castrated, the Tughluqs limped on until falling to the Sayyid dynasty in 1413, who now presided over a broken empire divided into smaller, independent sultanates such as in Gujarat, the Bengal and Deccan. Claiming descent from the house of Muhammad as the basis of their legitimacy, the Sayyid’s “political vision” went as far as the walls of Delhi, falling, as quickly as they had appeared, to the Lodi dynasty. Initially, the Afghan dynasty consolidated power quite effectively, recovering the Sultanate’s northern streaks with the help of the Afghan nobility, annexing Bihar and carving the city of Agra as their capital.[9] But the storms in the distant west which once devoured Delhi did not subside, once more threatening to storm its gates.

Babur

Timur’s death in 1405 marked the fragmentation his empire amongst his progeny, the Timurids, who embroiled in bitter feuds as true claimants to the throne. Although the Turco-Mongols remained occupied by endless battles, as they settled in cities and drifted from their nomadic state, they grew attuned to a well-refined culture, writing lines of poetry and sipping smooth wine under exceptionally vibrant tents. From the rolling hills of modern Uzbekistan emerged Babur, born in 1483 as an elite member of the Timurids, five generations down from Timur and a direct descendent of Genghis. Thrust into power at eleven to assume control of Ferghana after the death of his father, the young prince proved an exceptionally bright military mind, capturing the cultural epicenter of Samarkand at fifteen. A stroke of bad timing caused him to lose everything to rival princes and invading Uzbek warlords, forcing him to flee for the hills with his entourage under “much poverty and humiliation”, wandering the mountainside barefoot, starving, and living off “the loyalty or kindness of the hill-tribes”, until crossing the Hindu Kush to reach Kabul in 1504.[10] The city had fallen from Timurid control into the hands of an unpopular usurper, against whom Babur quickly gathered popular support to capture the city, establishing it as a base from where he intended to build an army and reclaim his homeland, now overrun by the Uzbeks –so much so that by 1507 Babur emerged as the only Timurid in power, welcoming the fleeing refugee princes to Kabul, who now crowned the young prince Padshah (Emperor) of the house of Timur. Initially, Babur had no plans to make for India, though momentarily considered making incursions into the subcontinent due to the looming Uzbek threat.[11] Forming ties with the Safavid court, (a Persian Shia dynasty) Babur captured the elusive prize of Samarkand for a third time in 1513, though after losing it once more, abandoned it altogether to affix his gaze on Hindustan, constructing armies in Kabul and undertaking reconnaissance expeditions for the task. Babur had also established contact with the Ottomans, a Turco-Persian dynasty who gained control over much of Arabia and would assume the mantle of Caliph by 1517. Expanding his territory, Babur captured Badakhshan, Kunduz, and initially moved on Hindustan to reclaim the territories of Timur’s empire and fulfil his role as Padshah, taking Bajaur and crossing the fields of the Punjab in 1519.

Relying primarily on the support of Afghan nobles by the time of Babur’s arrival in their lands, the Lodi dynasty’s ruler Ibrahim, had lost the support of members of the nobility, who promptly left his side to invite Babur to seize the throne. Thanks to these defections, Babur moved swiftly, taking Lahore in 1524, and finally faced Ibrahim on the plains of Panipat in April 1526. His ties with Muslim contemporary empires granted his forces a decisive edge over the Sultan, such as the unprecedented use of heavy artillery and “coordination between artillery and cavalry in cornering and confusing the Lodi forces”. Ibrahim Lodi killed in battle, Delhi was sacked, the Sultanate was extinguished into oblivion, and the Padshah claimed its lands, establishing the Mughal Empire.[12] There was little time to celebrate, as almost immediately, Babur’s position was challenged by a formidable Hindu Rajput alliance led by the ruler of Mewar, leading to a decisive battle in Khanwa. In the days leading to the battle, Babur distanced himself from his Timurid lineage to take his role as a Muslim ruler more seriously, ending extra taxes levied on Muslim citizens and publicly announcing he would “abstain from wine” whilst prepare his troops for battle, noting “men follow the religion of their kings”.[13] Rousing his troops, Babur defeated the Rajput alliance, yet he could not shake off the barbaric practices of his forefathers, erecting “a pillar of pagan heads” to symbolize his victory over the ‘disbelievers’ for the purposes of cultivating a fearful reputation and to scare off future threats.[14] His methods would be measured as barbaric by today’s standards, and while violence engulfed much of his life, it certainly did not dominate Babur’s mind, evident in his personal memoirs, the Baburnama. Its innovative, vibrant observations of the world motivated his descendants to follow suit, establishing a lasting family tradition of artistic reverence with profound cultural impacts on the face of the subcontinent. Although these early victories ensured his empire’s survival, they were short-lived for Babur, who died suddenly in 1531, leaving the precarious fate of his adolescent empire in the hands of his ambitious sons.

Humayun

As his father’s eldest son he had served closely alongside Babur in his conquests, though Humayun had not managed to acquire that same level of battle experience as Babur, due to a nervous nature compounded with a knack for opium that was “severely” reprimanded by Babur on numerous occasions, leading many within the court to doubt his effectiveness as Padshah.[15] Worse yet, Humayun’s own brothers proved to be his greatest internal challenges, as Babur had followed the Timurid tradition of splitting smaller portions of the empire between his progeny –a grave error, as acceding the key cities of Kabul and Kandahar to his son Kamran would allow the ambitious prince to strengthen his rival claim to throne. Even if Humayun’s timid nature allowed him to take action against his brothers, who at times cited open rebellion, it would be his father who held him back from beyond the grave, explicitly ordering Humayun on his deathbed to spare always his brothers. Humayun initially kept the ship steady, conquering much of Gujrat and Malwa in 1532, though he was outpaced by an ambitious and capable military commander, Sher Shah Suri, who conquered Bihar and attacked the Bengal 1538, later crowning himself Sultan of the Suri Empire. Humayun’s brothers did not come to his aid in the dart for the Bengal, and by 1540 the Mughal forces were soundly defeated as Sher Shah relentlessly chased Humayun out of his own former empire. The landless Padshah was doomed to repeat the steps of his father, desperately fleeing to the Sindhi desert “in a series of exhausting and dangerous treks” with his pregnant wife, reaching the town of Umarkot in October 1542, where a son, Akbar, was born at the home of a local Hindu Rajput.[16] Ultimately, Humayun was forced to exile himself and make for Persia, reaching the kingdom in 1544 through an arduous journey to strange lands which had him “reduced to boiling horse meat in a helmet”. Humayun’s extensive tour of the Kingdom’s cultural jewel of Herat, then undergoing a Timurid ‘Renaissance’, introduced the homeless Padshah “to the cultural traditions of his Timurid inheritance in their most refined form”. Striking an alliance with the Shah, Humayun was provided military support to successfully move against his selfish brothers and reclaim his empire, closing one long, arduous chapter of his life and opening another.[17] Within a year he recaptured Kandahar and Kabul from his brother, (blinding him for good measure) and finally split from the unstable traditions of the Timurid, claiming the entirety of his father’s lands for himself.

Sher Shah had proved himself not merely a ruthless military commander, but also an equally exceptional administrator, enacting reforms to centralize his empire, building and renovating cities and forts, and stretching the Grand Trunk Road from the Bengal to the feet of Kabul. After his death in 1545, an unstable succession drowned his empire in civil war, ripe for Humayun’s taking, who promptly posted his capable general Bairam Khan for the task, crossing the Mughal armies into the Punjab and defeating the remaining rivals; by June 1555, the bejeweled throne of Delhi yielded to Humayun after 15 excruciating years. Once more a Padshah, Humayun shifted to a life of comfort and stability, sending off generals to reclaim Mughal lands throughout the north and exporting painters from Persia to commission artwork; the sojourn in Persia had influenced him enough to reimagine it as the culture of his own empire, with refined Persian poetry yearning to become the language of the upper echelons of the empire. Salvaging his empire from oblivion, like his father, Humayun would not live long to see the fruits of his labors, dying in a freak accident in January 1556, mere months into his reign.

Akbar

If Humayun had not scrapped the traditions of the Timurids, the fate of the empire would have likely been left in precarious hands, though his son Akbar’s sole claim was also bolstered by powerful allies in court, most importantly his caretaker Maham Anga and military commander Bairam Khan, his regent. When the time came for Akbar to inherit the throne after Humayun died, despite being far off from the center and waging battle, he was crowned emperor on a hurriedly constructed platform –an unceremonious beginning for what would become a legendary reign of opulence. The first order of business would be to cement Mughal rule by dispatching the Suri claimants; the task proved somewhat difficult as at one point, Hemu, a former Hindu general of the Suris, seized the Delhi throne and declared himself king, forcing the Mughal forces to reroute the imperial army and defeat Hemu on the hills of Panipat. Following their victory, three generations down from Babur, Timurid practices remained ingrained among the Mughals; the victors mutilated Hemu, and Akbar seized his men to fashion “a victory pillar with their heads.”[18] Akbar consolidated his reign with vicious precision largely thanks to his allies serving dutifully in their roles, with Bairam Khan making short work of the remaining Suri threat and Maham Anga cementing Akbar’s position in court. Although the boy-king had been uninterested in his studies, political maneuvers came naturally; when the pair had grown too big for their boots, he dispatched them with such ruthlessness that it served as a reminder to the court that Timur’s blood still flowed in Delhi, marking the last time a regent ruled over Akbar, or any Mughal thereafter. The young emperor continued consolidating, stamping out factions who declared independence and expanding his empire’s frontier though inroads in the Punjab, along with annexing the Mulwa sultanate by 1570 following a decade-long struggle.

Born in the house of a Hindu and tutored by Persian Shias, Akbar had somewhat of a syncretic religious experience early on. The relationship between the two largest religious groups of his empire, Hindus and Muslims, had been historically strained; early Muslim rulers admired parts of Hinduism yet viewed some key practices as incompatible or abhorrent due to their own religious beliefs, such as widow suicide, polytheism, idol-worship, cremation and reincarnation –practices strictly forbidden in Islam. Aside from the obvious glitter of booty, the goal of early expansion in the subcontinent had been to increase Islam’s foothold in the region, and not necessarily the final goal –numerous failed attempts would be made, especially by early rulers, to cut through and reach China. These early Muslim rulers, most notably Mahmud of Ghazni, while certainly moved by the riches of Hindustan, also saw their expansion of Islam as a religious task, and themselves as holy warriors (Ghazi). Babur would also hold this view, though much like his many predecessors, fought against Muslim rulers whilst striking alliances with Hindus. By Akbar’s reign, Persian culture (largely moved by mysticism) had perched itself, thanks to the work of its poets, saints, and Akbar’s own tutors, squarely within the core of the Mughal empire, and its mysticism hammered the emperor’s syncretic beliefs. In 1562, Akbar first tested the strains of Muslim clerics in his court, after becoming the first Mughal emperor to marry a Hindu, a Rajput princess, drawing the ire of his Muslim clerics as Islam had forbidden marriage outside the Abrahamic faiths. Not the first Muslim ruler with Hindu wives, Akbar went further, permitting them “to practise their Hindu rites within the walls of the royal harem”, and for him, the criticism he had received from his clerics was worth it; the marriage secured an alliance with Rajasthan, “the most important and powerful of the Hindu provinces”, whose leaders offered themselves up to serve in senior administrative positions while providing their formidable armies. Personally, Akbar’s view of religion was to provide relative easiness, not restrictions –once dismissing a Sunni adviser and replaced him with a Shia one, after the former protested Akbar’s practice of keeping three hundred wives amongst a harem of five thousand.[19] Although it was becoming clear that the Mughals were drifting from Timurid practices the longer they remained in the subcontinent, the restless spirit of the nomad remained alive in them, with Akbar keeping his court mobile for the purposes of stamping out rebellion.

Akbar ruled longer than either of his successors combined, providing his exceptional mind ample time to maintain a highly composed, well-paid, and technologically-advanced Mughal force capable of outlasting many long sieges, doubling the empire’s size to stretch the borders past Balochistan in the west and Bengal in the east, after annexing the Bengal sultanate in 1576, (whose fertile ground provided plentiful cotton to bulk up the royal coffers), capturing Gujrat in 1573, Kashmir in 1586, and reacquiring Babur’s beloved Kabul and Kandahar in 1595, stopping short of Rajasthan. In the Deccan Akbar fought against Muslim sultanates, managing to annex only of portions of its north such as Khandesh and Berar. To consolidate his territories, Akbar expanded Sher Shah’s administrative reforms, organizing the empire into provinces (subah), collecting taxes based off land revenue in proportion to its fertility, and even providing the modern equivalent of highway-patrol for merchants. Overseeing one of the world’s largest economies at the time, Akbar enjoyed unparalleled personal luxury, from pet tigers and inflated harems in the thousands, to palaces fitted with sparkling jewels, a stupendous shining new capital crafted from the dust, extensive renovations of the forts of Allahabad, Agra and Lahore, a magnificent palace of a tomb for Humayun on the outskirts of Delhi, and to immortalize this staggering level of opulence and power, Akbar commissioned a detailed biography of his reign, preserving himself for the ages.

Having breached the furthest frontiers of kingly dreams, Akbar’s only remaining ambitions (aside from conquering the Deccan) were that of becoming the divine –pierce the sky and place himself atop the clouds. Embarking on such a divine path first required reconciling the religious divisions existing between the religious intelligentsia of his court; the endlessly bickering Hindus, Muslims and Jains. Hindus and Muslim retained a degree of incompatibility: Muslims ate the beef Hindus regarded as sacred, while Hindus prayed to idols Muslims regarded as sacrilegious. For Akbar, among the world’s most powerful figures in his time, the solution to solve this impasse was a convenient one; establish a national unity with Akbar at its core. Much like the modern concepts of statehood which exist today, Akbar sought to establish a state ideology detached from religion, but believed that by forming a nationalism whose ethos revolved around his monarchy, Akbar could both ascend to that higher plane of divinity and mend religious divisions simultaneously. As a Muslim ruler overseeing subjects who were overwhelmingly Hindu in population, ‘accommodating’ his Hindu subjects would be key. Initially, this yielded positive progress towards religious tolerance, as Hindus were drawn into the administration at greater numbers and Akbar intervened in ending brutal practices such as widow-suicide. Gradually, however, his Muslims subjects grew affronted by actions they regarded as over accommodating and unfit for a Muslim ruler, such as banning cow slaughter, replacing the Islamic calendar with one forged by the emperor, terminating the practice of dispersing charity amongst pilgrims in Muslims holy lands, abolishing jizya, holding Hindu festivals in court by welcoming in “newly washed and painted cows”, and Akbar altering his own appearance, from turban to tilak, all in “Hindu fashion”.[20]

Seeking to replace the power of the disagreeing Muslim clerics, Akbar announced he alone would be the final arbitrator of disagreements on Islamic rulings –a welcome move were it not for the fact that he knew little of Islamic jurisprudence, and in further affronting move for the clerics, Akbar opened the court for religious discussions to the leaders of a number of faiths within his realm, welcoming in Jesuit priests from the Portuguese colony of Goa to satisfy his intrigue into various religious beliefs, and allowing them to make openly offensive remarks towards Islamic practices in court, riling some clerics enough to unsuccessfully rebel in favor of Akbar’s younger brother. Either because it was clear that his religious policies had not worked to the effect he had hoped, or perhaps convinced to push them further, in 1582 Akbar founded a new religion, Din-i Ilahi, primarily amalgamating Hindu, Islamic and Zoroastrian beliefs with the Padshah playing centerfold as the divinely-guided monarch. Declaring it the official state religion, the emperor had hoped to use his immense power in spreading his form of religious nationalism to thereby solve his empire’s religious divisions, but they did not; failing to realize just how deep a role religion played in the lives of his subjects, neither the Muslims of his court and realm, (led most significantly by Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi) nor the Hindus, resolved to face “assimilative extinction”, and even Akbar’s staunchest Rajput allies inexplicably informed that amalgamating Muslims and Hindus was impossible.[21] Din-i Ilahi would never become the major movement for unity as Akbar had hoped, withering away soon after his death –his rare failure proving that even under his illustrious and absolute reign, the differences between both groups made reconciliation extremely intangible. Akbar would be the first to embark on a major initiative of uniting diversity in the subcontinent under a ‘neutral’ ideology; he would certainly not be the last.

Despite his solid grip over the empire, Akbar also could not reign in his eldest son Salim, whose arrogance, recklessness and an especially ambitious itch to take the throne had become a great irritant to the emperor, though he remained the only suitable heir alive after his other sons drugged themselves to an early grave. Depressed by the state of his succession, Akbar grew increasingly ill, and after bestowing Jahangir with Humayun’s sword to confirm him as the forthcoming Padshah, Akbar died in October 1605, months shy of fifty years as king. Whatever his religious inclinations were, in the end Akbar was entombed, like his father before him, in a dazzling garden-tomb fitted with Islamic calligraphy.

Jahangir

Taking the regnal name Jahangir, Salim had been begrudgingly posted as successor to avert a civil war, yet after soon taking the throne, his own young son Khusrau did just that, besieging Lahore in April 1607. Jahangir’s armies made short work of the prince and brought him before Delhi, where, (not mirroring Humayun’s level of tolerance) the emperor subjected the imperial city to witness the spectacle of a royal parade, consisting of Khusrau’s closest followers sewn alive into wet animal skins, followed by the prince riding elephant-back through the street lined with stakes of his impaled men –the ruthless spirit of Timur raged in Delhi still. In running the practical affairs of the state, Jahangir preferred comfortably taking the backseat and atop his father’s long list of achievements; the empire may very well have unraveled amidst his addiction to opium and alcohol were it not for the skillful administration of his chief Empress Mehr-Un-Nisa, (whom he titled ‘Nur Jahan’) who practically controlled the empire from behind the veil of the public eye (purdah). Nur Jahan’s stock would rise considerably in court after prince Khurram, Jahangir’s son pegged as heir, married her niece Mumtaz Mahal in 1612. While the king relaxed in tranquility after cementing his power, the young prince took charge of military expansion, resulting in “an unending series of spectacular successes”, such as defeating the Rajput Ranas of Mewar in 1614, and in the south “rapidly persuaded the various Deccani rulers to negotiate terms”. Returning to his father in triumph, Khurram was showered in priceless jewels and bestowed the title ‘Shah Jahan’ (king of the world).[22]

The only long-term threats emerged from the far west; the Portuguese, establishing a colony in Goa in the early 1500s, had begun to assert their naval dominance in the Indian Ocean, to the extent that Mughal subjects were now forced to pay for passes in order to cross the waters for religious pilgrimage. While such concerns did not rile Jahangir’s feathers, in 1613 he became enraged to the point of no return, after the Portuguese seized his mother’s ship transporting pilgrims, either “out of pure greed, or anger at the new Mughal friendship with the English”, prompting Jahangir to respond with sealing a Jesuit church in Agra, besieging their ports at Daman, and sparking a war which ceased the Portuguese trade, settling only after Jahangir received adequate compensation.[23] The English, who had long been hoping to secure themselves a position in the opulent trade routes of the empire, used the strains as an opportunity to push their influence in court, led by their ‘ambassador’ Sir Thomas Roe, who famously dazzled the king with European gifts. Although not able to secure any major trading concessions for the East India Company for a variety of reasons, (not least of which was Roe’s own “strong dislike of the country to which he had been sent”) Roe was essential in establishing “the seeds of future ties” between the British Company and the Mughals.[24]

In following the traditions of his forefathers, Jahangir heavily patronized the arts and literature, penning his memoirs and commissioning dazzling projects such as the dazzling ‘Picture Wall’ mosaic in Lahore Fort. Similar to his capital in Agra, Jahangir added numerous additions to the fort in Lahore, including a pavilion decorated with European Christian iconography featuring his bourgeoning interest in the west. In the lush veil of Kashmir, a favorite of the Mughals for recuperation and relaxation, Jahangir displayed his familial love of Persian culture by emulating the gardens of paradise, (Charbagh) in his Shalimar Bagh, a lush garden fitted with pools, fountains and numerous species of plants and trees, but despite the influence of Persian culture in the empire remaining strong, bilateral relations with Persia did not, degrading severely over Shah Abbas laying siege to Kandahar in 1606. The Muslim clerics had breathed a sigh of relief when Akbar died, hoping that Jahangir’s less hands-on approach would keep any divine inclinations at bay. Early on into his reign, Jahangir had executed the Sikh Guru Arjan as punishment for siding with his rebellious son prince Khusrau, sparking a religious conflict to which they nodded in approval, though the drug-addled emperor, known in the palace for his harsh and callous mannerisms, not only also married a Hindu princess who bore his heir Shah Jahan, but also offended the Muslim clerisy after breaking from the tradition of Muslim rulers, minting coins not bearing religious symbols, but zodiac signs, and commissioned portraits of himself clasping a glass of wine, or placing him at the center of and above all forms of life, donning a halo, in a fit of aggrandizement similar to his father’s. To drive home his own grand ego, Jahangir paraded around his empire surrounded by a camp of mammoth proportions, which he very deliberately maintained –at one point commanding “his artillery to bombard Ajmer” to force its residents to attach themselves to his ever-expanding “imperial entourage”.[25] Naturally the Muslim clerics despised Jahangir’s attitude just as much, but luckily for them, the idle king cared little for religious diversity, as his religious policy was of impulsive instinct; conversing with a scantily-clad fakir one day, and destroying idols to disprove local myths the next.

Although Nur Jahan had shouldered most of the empire’s affairs, she would be outfoxed by Shah Jahan, who ended the rebellious Khusrau in 1622 to emerge as his father’s clear and capable successor. By now, Jahangir’s health had rapidly declined due to prolonged drug abuse, moving his chief consort to secure her own position by proposing Jahangir’s inexperienced, docile son Shahryar to the throne, knowing her positioned would be weakened under Shah Jahan. The move resulted in the first major Mughal territorial loss in years, after Shah Jahan, fearful of losing the throne by being too far from the center, refused orders to march against the Persians and broke out in open rebellion, forcing Jahangir to give chase and lose Kandahar in the process. Captured in 1626 Shah Jahan was forgiven, though the situation between the rebel prince and his queen remained tense. In October 1627, returning from Kashmir to Lahore in an attempt to recuperate, Jahangir died. Nur Jahan desperately installed Shehryar to the throne, though was outflanked, imprisoned by her own brother, Shah Jahan’s father-in-law Asaf Khan, while the prince mobilized the troops to defeat Shehryar, taking the bejeweled throne in January 1628.

Shah Jahan

The reign of the fifth Mughal emperor was so notable that even among his first acts as king would be historic; while Nur Jahan was forcibly removed from the court to a quiet life, the princes she instigated would not be so lucky; Shah Jahan had Shahryar, along with his accomplices and potential threats, including his cousins –five princes in all, promptly executed to neutralize all major potential threats to his throne, establishing a long and bloody custom of fratricide in the name of ‘stability’. Although Shah Jahan had close allies in court and on among the armies, such as his Grand Vizier Asaf Khan, key to his early years, and later known the world over for her tomb, would be his Empress Mumtaz Mahal. His closest confidant, so crucial was she that Shah Jahan’s entire family would regularly accompany him on his military campaigns, and it was during a campaign in the Deccan in 1631 that Mumtaz would die, giving birth to their fourteenth child. Distraught, Shah Jahan would never truly emotionally recover, leaving for an extended seclusion only to emerge and spend the following decades entombing Mumtaz in a towering palace of marble ingenuity, the Taj Mahal. A slow territorial expansion continued under Shah Jahan, who appointed his sons, (namely the eldest Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb, and Shah Shuja) as administrators and generals at the head of his powerful Mughal forces, leaving the emperor sufficient time to run the affairs of the empire from the center, such as addressing grievances and “rapidly” dispensing justice. A byproduct of the syncretic reigns of Akbar and Jahangir, while the judicial system was elaborate, allowing petitions at “four different types of court”, including separate ones for Hindus and Muslims, in practice it had failed to distinguish the differences of Muslim and Hindu law, and Shah Jahan was forced to primarily hear cases of “blood and religion”.[26] The Indo-Persian cultural mix undoubtedly reached its zenith under Shah Jahan, who attracted and recruited talented poets, artisans and sculptors to his court, utilizing them in extensively renovating the forts of Lahore and Agra, fitting them with pavilions, marble palaces, audience halls, a Shalimar Bagh in Lahore, mosques of pearl, and innovate gems such as palaces adorned entirely with mirrors or built underground to survive the grueling summer humidity, and a new capital, Shahjahanabad (now known as old Delhi), transporting his court to the triumphant red sandstone palace, which at its center held a solid gold, jewel-encrusted throne inspired by King Solomon.

Shah Jahan’s reign was marked with unparalleled economic prosperity, swimming the emperor in precious stones, though crop failures in the early 1630s led millions to starve, and the Sikhs, now led by Guru Hargobind, continued their religiously-motivated rebellion in the Punjab, chipping away at Mughal authority after winning a series of battles at Amritsar in 1634 and Kartarpur the following year. Shah Jahan sought to restore Timurid authority in central Asia, launching a series of failed attempts to recapture Badakhshan and Balkh, and while successfully recovering Kandahar in 1638 from the Safavids, by 1653 the Safavids recaptured Kandahar once and for all, never again to fall in Timurid hands. With the Portuguese problems also continued, after they began forceful conversions to Christianity and abducted locals into slavery, pushing Shah Jahan’s hand to drive them out of the Bengal. While several Deccani sultanates did finally fall to Mughal suzerainty, a new threat slowly emerged after the fall of Bijapur; the Marathas, a Hindu clan once wielding significant power in Muslim administrations. Although born to a Hindu mother, Shah Jahan took no Hindu wives, and continued the preestablished practices of destroying places of worship to curb political threats; news of forced conversions by the Jesuits resulted in the final demolition of the church in Agra, the Sikh rebellion was met with the destruction of a temple in Lahore, and in the midst of a rebellion by Hindus in Bundelkhand, Shah Jahan ordered all recently built temples be destroyed and banned constructing new ones. But not only would the Hindus remain a vital part of the Mughal administration, like his father, Shah Jahan “patronized poets and scholars” of the Hindu language, so much so that he would extend “the golden period of Hindi poetry”.[27] But While his reign marked the absolute cultural zenith of the Mughals, it was clear that cracks and fissures had appeared amongst the religious rebellions specifically against Muslim rule.

Two sons towered Shah Jahan’s administration above the rest; Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. Worlds apart, the deeply religious Aurangzeb carried extensive military experience after leading the troops on his father’s numerous campaigns, while Dara Shikoh, syncretic towards religion and emulating Din-i Ilahi to pen a book to that effect, was far more inexperienced in leadership, despite his father appointing him to several senior posts after confirming him as heir. While Aurangzeb had managed to stamp out rebellions in Orchha and lead his father’s campaigns in the Deccan, Dara’s incompetence lost the Mughals Kandahar. His father nevertheless maintained Dara as heir, embittering Aurangzeb, who viewed the older prince an incompetent, spoiled, wine-chugging heretic enjoying his father’s devotion while the younger prince was off fighting in the muddy fringes of the empire. Bitter hostilities developed between the younger prince and the emperor because of this; although Aurangzeb’s appointment as Governor of Gujarat in 1645 was received positively by Shah Jahan for “his efficiency in controlling this turbulent province”, along with his role in retrieving stranded troops in Badakhshan, and in the Deccan where Aurangzeb exhibited “more effectively than ever before his great administrative and military talents” by 1653, Dara’s allies in court fanned the flames of the pair’s rift, achieving the result that despite his many successes above Dara, in the five years Aurangzeb administered the Deccan, not once was he invited to his father’s court. Meanwhile, Dara was busy committing acts akin to treason; accepting bribes from the Deccan’s “immensely rich kingdoms of Golconda and Bijapur” to push the emperor to order Aurangzeb halt his military campaign as he neared victory, deliberately losing these kingdoms to block out Aurangzeb’s success; while one was busy capturing his father’s attention at the harm of the empire, the other was off preserving it.[28]

Feeling himself used, pushed aside and affronted, Aurangzeb reached his limits by September 1657, for after the oldest-reigning Mughal emperor had fallen ill, Dara was made regent –a decision neither of the three younger princes agreed with. In the war of secession which followed, unlike the other two, slyly, Aurangzeb did not claim the Peacock Throne, but rather sought ‘alliances’ with his brothers while destroying Dara’s allies on the battlefield. In late May 1658 outside the walls of Agra, Dara finally met his younger brother on the battlefield, against the wishes of his father who, still alive, wished settling for peace. Ultimately, Dara’s syncretic mysticism did little to help him on the battlefield before Aurangzeb’s practical experience, with the latter’s superior forces relatively easily managing to mow down the poor souls fighting under Dara’s pitiful directions. Victorious, the unwanted prince marched on Agra to receive the sword of Alamgir from his father, whose suggestions to divide the empire amongst warring princes went soundly ignored by Aurangzeb. Thereafter confined to his fort in Agra, Shah Jahan would spend the rest of days looking mournfully over his wife’s marble tomb glistening in the moonlight. Three decades of his rule had been overturned that July, when mere months after the king had fallen ill, a new figure sat atop the Peacock Throne.

Aurangzeb

The new emperor had little time for pomp and ceremony, as he had brothers to dispatch of; the brother Dara ran desperately from Agra to Lahore, cracking open the treasury in hopes of purchasing a new army, ultimately arriving in Gujrat. Aurangzeb left the task to his trusted generals, rounding about to face the forces of his brother Shah Shuja, defeating him in January 1659 and pushing the broken prince to flee past Bengal to the kingdom of Arakan, where he and his family soon died under peculiar circumstances. Suffering yet another defeat at the hands of Aurangzeb’s forces that March in Ajmer, Dara fled once more, though was promptly captured and sent to Delhi. He and his son would arrive in the midst of August’s sweltering heat to serve as the center of another pitiful parade; the pair were executed the following day on the king’s orders, whose judges found Dara guilty of apostacy and had him buried in an unmarked and unidentifiable grave amongst the many royals near Humayun’s tomb. Rival claimants to the throne remained, including Aurangzeb’s brother Murad and Dara’s son,  though while the son was easily executed in 1662, the decision of Murad’s elimination posed a moral dilemma, as the prince had been whom Aurangzeb forged an alliance with and aided his own rise to the throne, yet because his existence threatened Aurangzeb’s claim, he was promptly executed in 1661, on the grounds that he had murdered his finance minister after declaring himself emperor.

Like his father, Aurangzeb had removed potential threats through very brutal acts, yet he had good reason to do so, as neither of his brothers would have acted differently had they emerged victorious; Dara dreamt having Aurangzeb butchered into four pieces “and displayed on Delhi’s four main gates” –a far cry from the victor who had atleast granted him a proper burial.[29] Deeply dedicated to the religion and a follower of the teachings of Sirhindi, Aurangzeb adhered to a more clear-cut version of Islam and Sufism, carrying the belief that a Muslim ruler by nature was obligated to abide by, and dispense Islamic law. Perhaps guided by this inclination to follow religious law, when it came to matters of justice, as in the cases of his brothers, Aurangzeb marked a departure from his father’s unexplained killings of rival princes, as he had provided a reason for these political executions, though the one aspect of his takeover Aurangzeb struggled to justify, would be the imprisonment of his father. Swinging between providing a reason for this particular decision of ‘justice’ and whom it had fallen on, (as fathers hold a position of exceedingly high esteem in Islam) Aurangzeb’s solution to simply ignore the situation by claiming it was an amicable decision, would haunt him until Shah Jahan’s death in 1666 –at which point he likely hoped that burying the old king beside his sorely missed wife under the Taj would absolve Aurangzeb’s own conscience of certain guilt.

Initially Aurangzeb retained most practices of his predecessors, building grand projects such as a mausoleum for his wife that emulated the Taj, a pearl mosque in the Red Fort, an iconic entrance to the Lahore fort and a sprawling red mosque to accompany it, (serving as the world’s largest mosque for centuries) and fitting such projects with typical Mughal markings such as floral designs, red sandstone and pearl. But by the 1660s, Aurangzeb took on a more serious approach in his role as a Islamic ruler, adopting practices more aligned with Islamic law, changing the face of the empire; music and alcohol were banned, the Islamic calendar was revived, state patronage shifted importance to calligraphers, practices deifying the emperor or rooted in Hindu customs ceased, by the following decade Aurangzeb completed the mammoth task of codifying Islamic law[30] –a monumental piece of work establishing the basic principles of an Islamic government, and in 1679 he revived the collection of Jizya from non-Muslim subjects, though applied it more pliably, exempting non-Muslim military servicemen, administrators and spiritual leaders. The Fatawa-I Alamgiri essentially served as a religious handbook for state policy, forming the basis of the judicial system’s laws and rulings, influencing religious and state policy such as mobilizing clerics to collect Jizya and enforce laws pertaining to social concern. Based on this evidence, it could very well be surmised that since the Arabs, no effort had been made to do what Aurangzeb had now done, or at the very least had come very close to doing; establish a functioning Islamic state in the subcontinent. Although it may seem an abandonment of the empire’s religious tolerance, Aurangzeb enacted policies relating to his subjects quite uniformly, impacting both Hindus and Muslims, such as restricting religious “celebrations on a grand scale”, imposed to scale down wasteful spending and halt crime, impacting Muslim and Hindu holidays and festivals equally. His administration admitted in Hindus at record numbers, including leading posts in the imperial forces, and while the emperor himself was not a patron of researching and developing Hindu literature, several of his close relatives continued supporting such projects, whose Sanskrit beneficiaries “never ceased to recognize Aurangzeb” in allowing them to do so.[31]

Shuffling prayer beads in hand, memorizing and penning a version of the holy book and sewing prayer caps, Aurangzeb’s deep personal inclinations towards Islam did not cease the Mughals’ never-ending expansionist wars –even those against other Muslims. Early on he consolidated rule over Kashmir and captured the port city of Chittagong, though what pushed Aurangzeb was an itch to finally take the Deccan Sultanates. Ever focused on this dream, the emperor made the unprecedented move of shifting his entire court to the Deccan, departing from Delhi for what would be the last time in 1679. Two years later the Mughal court firmly established itself in the south, from where Aurangzeb, despite nearly surpassing his father as the oldest-reigning Mughal king, continued leading military campaigns himself –the Timurid spirit remaining incessantly mobile. Perhaps viewing the remaining Deccani sultanates of Golconda and Bijapur a threat to his rule, or perhaps hoping to merge these states into what he viewed as the correct exegesis of an Islamic state, Aurangzeb, presiding over the world’s largest economy, launched his nearly unlimited pool of resources at them with major success, starving out the kingdoms, with Bijapur first in 1686 and Golconda soon after, to achieve Akbar’s dream of drawing in much of the Deccan under the might of the Mughal maps –an achievement not without its costs, as Aurangzeb being so distant from the center at such great a time had allowed corrupt administrators embezzling jizya funds to roam free from the emperor’s swift justice. But contrary to popular claims, his military policies also managed to repel British intrusions that sought compelling the Mughals in granting them trading privileges in 1686, capturing the Company’s assets and forcing it to surrender through naval blockades.

In recognizing the authority and influence of religion over state policy for the first time in a millennium, Aurangzeb was essentially building a system completely from the ground up, establishing the foundations of a state which had scarcely existed in the region to this extent, which required ensuring state consolidation. Like his predecessors, rebellions were often during Aurangzeb’s rein, and he dispensed with such threats quite ruthlessly, no matter their caste or creed; in the Punjab, Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed on the grounds of being “militarily opposed [to] Mughal state interests”; Aurangzeb ignored the Guru’s importance as a religious leader not in an act of bigotry, but due to his opposition to Mughal authority.[32] Ultimately, it would be Akbar’s open policies granting Hindus opportunities of growth within the empire that would begin unraveling with wider ramifications during Aurangzeb’s rule. Although asserting to rule as a leader abiding by Islamic law, Aurangzeb had received vital support from the Hindu court nobles in his bid for the throne, and once in power, placed Hindus in key areas of his administration such as Raghunath, his minister directing state finances, who Aurangzeb praised by bestowing the title of Raja and for “his sage advice on how to appoint good administrators”, which followed along a string of similar appointments of Non-Muslims to senior posts in the administration solely on merit –including one Hindu bureaucrat who prayed for Aurangzeb’s “long life and continued prosperity”.[33] Not only had “Aurangzeb continued to employ Hindus in high offices”, but as the empire expanded into the Deccan, by the latter half of his reign the size of Hindu participation rose to their highest percentages ever; Hindus acceded the noble ranks of atleast 5000 increased to nearly 33%, while officers with the rank of 500 and upwards rose to nearly 32% –much higher than Akbar’s 22.5%.[34]

Because the Hindu nobles often tied their identities to ethnic backgrounds (such as Rajput, Maratha and Jat) rather than religion in Mughal courts, they rarely represented a distinct and united Hindu bloc, (harboring rivalries amongst themselves) though their overwhelming similarities were belonging to elite-caste backgrounds. Even after Akbar initiated the involvement of “Hindu elites” into Mughal nobility, the empire continued often facing “periodic rebellions” from some of these elites, who “played both sides of the field, accepting and opposing Mughal rule at different moments”, using Akbar’s open policies to climb the Mughal ranks one day, professing loyalty to reap the rewards of wealth and influential administrative posts, only to rebel after using this newly acquired status to their advantage the next.[35]

These rebellious trends initiated under Akbar’s open policies would continue under Aurangzeb, (such as the Rajputs who rose against him in the late 1670s) igniting the gunpowder that would erupt the empire through destructive storms. Among those who turned away from Mughal patronage was Shivaji, a highly skilled Maratha warrior who interchangeably served the three Deccani sultanates and the Mughals, until rebelling and capturing areas in the Deccan while Aurangzeb left to fight the war of succession. After Aurangzeb took the throne, Shivaji plundered the wealthy Mughal port city of Surat and was defeated in 1665, but rather than face the executioner’s block, he was pardoned and invited back to the Mughal fold by Aurangzeb. He accepted the Emperor’s sovereignty, though before the decade was out, reignited his “flagrant denial of Mughal authority” by waging war on the empire. By 1674, while Aurangzeb was off fighting Pathan rebels in the turbulent northwestern frontier, Shivaji shed his low-caste origins by “reclaiming” a Brahmin heritage to gather legitimacy as a Hindu elite, and proclaimed himself King of the Marathas, enjoying the support of everyone from Muslim soldiers, judges, and the Deccani Sultanates –operating at times “against Hindu powers in south India”.[36] Aurangzeb’s solution to this new power cropping up and threatening his authority was to quickly eliminate all such threats or reconcile them back to the fold whenever possible, which primarily explains why he executed political and religious opponents on the grounds of rebellion, or when he involved himself to take action against certain Brahmins who had been abusing their status prey on the ignorant, at one point “teaching ‘false books’”, attracting Hindu and Muslim subjects.[37] This also explained why, whilst declaring his administration “caretakers” of Hindu and Jain temples, providing them patronage and state security, Aurangzeb also sanctioned their destruction (which numbered “at most, a few dozen”) on similar grounds of aiding rebels; notably, the Vishvanatha Temple was destroyed in 1669 as punishment for the surrounding Benares community who had rebelled and aided Shivaji, while the Keshava Deva Temple was destroyed the following year for identical reasons, emulating “a religiously clothed statement about the dire consequences of opposing Mughal authority”.[38]

Following Shivaji’s death in 1680, he was succeeded by a slew of descendants who reigned turbulently and shortly, including his son Sambhaji, whom the Mughals eventually captured and executed. Despite their political turbulence, the guerrilla tactics of the Marathas remained the most significant impasse to the Mughals’ southern absorption, which just stretched to the region of Tamil Nadu following a grueling eight-year siege. By the 18^th century, the octogenarian Aurangzeb had managed to stretch the empire to its territorial zenith, and while this reign essentially embedded his notions on Muslim identity within the subcontinent for years to come, his ultimate goal of unifying the world’s most populous empire, (accounting for a quarter of the world’s population) under his concepts of an Islamic state were hastily pursued, as rather than first solidify the expansive regions under his rule, Aurangzeb had continued the territorial conquests of his forefathers. This hastiness was also due to internal factors, such as the difficulty of juggling the introduced state laws and practices whilst seeking solid alliances with the fickle elite of various Hindu ethnic groups and Muslim rulers –and the performance of the imperial family, which alone would have kept Aurangzeb more than occupied.

Learning the bitter lessons of nepotism from Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb essentially banned it within his own kin, leaping at the chance to punish noble incompetence as an example to his subjects, especially his own sons for their errors and failures, which led to a certain emotional distance between the emperor and his princes, who subsequently lashed out in ways indicative of rebellious attitudes and grave incompetence; one prince rebelled and was driven out by his father’s forces to exile in Persia. Consequently, this weakened each of their powers at court, especially their chances at forming the necessary alliances that would later be needed to take the throne. More precariously, by his later years, Aurangzeb viewed none of his surviving three sons as capable enough for the peacock throne, far more preferring their own sons over them. In the twilight years of his life, surrounded by war and conquest, the aged king approaching his ninth decade was now in a rage against time, hoping that his state policies and aggressive expansion would solidify Muslim rule, and sufficiently bolster the empire to allow his descendants to face its multi-faceted problems with confidence.

A Fall from Grace and Dignity

After serving nearly five decades as Emperor, Aurangzeb Alamgir died in February 1707 at the advanced age of 88, buried, as according to his wishes, in a simple grave open to the skies tucked away in a corner at the compound of a Sufi saint. Declaring no clear heir (purportedly advising his sons to divvy the empire amongst themselves) with his son Azam Shah seizing the crown, Aurangzeb’s death sparked an immediate war of succession, in which the eldest of the trio, Muazzam, emerged victorious and crowned Bahadur Shah I that June. But the open policies of Akbar, unknowingly empowering various groups outside the Mughal fold, led them to become powerful enough to suffocate the empire: the Jat and Rajput nobles and the Sikhs broke out in rebellion while the Marathas gained ground in the south. Aurangzeb’s successor died just five years into his reign in 1712, and rather than rising to face these external threats in unity, the Mughal princes bowed to pressure from all sides, fragmenting from within: where four Padshahs had reigned between Akbar and Aurangzeb in a period of a century and a half, six Mughal kings had come and gone following the latter’s death, with a seventh, Muhammad Shah, finally coming to power in 1719 to rule for three decades. Within the empire, the resulting princes had lost power to elite factions in court, who took control as kingmakers placing wearable puppets in power, or declared their own royal dynasties as nawabs, namely in Oudh, the Bengal and Hyderabad. Aurangzeb’s efforts to repel western interference was reversed by his pathetic descent Emperor Farrukhsiyar, who in 1717 revived the hopes of the East India Company by granting them extensive, overpowering trading rights in the Bengal. Although Islamic culture retained its zest due to continued imperial patronage, Akbar’s powerful administrative system crippled, and eventually the damage could no longer be reversed; the Marathas took much of the south, while Nader Shah of Persia, ironically an admirer of Timur, invaded the empire in the late 1730s, taking Kabul, Peshawar and Lahore, eventually reaching Delhi in 1739. As Muhammad Shah watched helplessly from the sidelines, Nader Shah’s plunder became a thing of legend; slaughtering 30,000 of his subjects in a single day, and robbing the capital of its wonderous imperial treasures, including the beaming Koh-i-Noor diamond and the peacock throne itself, with the sad remaining imperial trinkets a pitiful remainder of a glory that once was, and would never again be.[39]

As the British set their eyes on the land, no longer wishing to acquire trading privileges but chunks of it, another four emperors came and left in just 12 years, with Shah Alam II taking the throne in 1760. He ruled over a broken empire, as during this time, the Maratha confederacy of autonomous states pushed north to take Peshawar and finally Delhi, terminating the sovereignty of the Mughals, whose kings were now juggled between the victors of Delhi claiming themselves ‘protectors’ of the throne, from the Marathas to the Afghan Durranis. In the midst of this chaos arrived the west for the spoils; the French supported the Mughals and nawabs against the British, leading to a series of wars in which the East India company emerged victorious and began establishing colonial settlements. Propped up by the Marathas, Shah Alam II’s rule would be dismal; his Nawab alliance lost to the British at Buxar, who followed with a decisive victory against the French and their Nawab allies at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, allowing the British to annex the Bengal and unseat French influence. In the Punjab, Sikhs had consolidated their ranks to form a confederacy and repel the Durranis from the 1750s, taking Lahore and later Kashmir to form an empire of their own under Ranjit Singh, who by the 1830s assumed control over much of the northwest, including Peshawar in the west and Multan in the south. As Aurangzeb’s Badshahi mosque turned to play host to Sikh barracks, Mughal architectural gems were looted and refashioned. Although Muslim power diminished between the Mughals, in the southern Sultanate of Mysore it rose inexorably under Hyder Ali and his son Tipu, who, similar to Aurangzeb, had molded his deeply religious inclinations into state policy. His ambitious reign oversaw an effort to curb British colonialism through diplomatic missions to the Muslim world, and an alliance with France had allowed both father and son to utilize its modern methods in rapidly developing their own military, along with creating advanced artillery such as the Mysorean rockets, establishing a formidable resistance to the British, though betrayal led to his defeat and death in 1799. The ‘Tiger of Mysore’ falling in battle, his throne broken and treasures whisked away to be gaped at in faraway museums, so significant was his fight in the contexts of the Muslim world as the Ottoman Navy laid destroyed elsewhere, that his death “meant the extinguishment of Muslims hopes for political prestige” in the subcontinent, and the words etched above his tomb, “Gone is the glory of Ind as well as of Rum”, became “prophetic”.[40] Tipu’s defeat paved the way for British control the globe over; Mysore was diminished to a state under their subjugation, and the Mysorean rockets were refashioned as the Congreve rocket to be used against Napoleon. Following a series of wars, the Marathas were also terminated at the hands of the East India Company in 1818, who now also claimed themselves protectors of the Mughal throne, whose name still rung of legend amongst the locals. When Akbar II ascended to power in 1806, the emperor, stripped of his ranks wielding nominal control, was confined to the walls of the imperial capital as the ‘king of Delhi’, slapped with “serving as a living museum exhibit” who “charged foreign visitors for an audience in order to make ends meet.”[41] Assuming control over Maratha territory, the British finally established nearly absolute supremacy throughout the subcontinent after defeating the Sikh empire in 1849, annexing the Punjab and the northwest frontier.

The East India company ruled through a string of alliances, nobles and warriors, handsomely rewarded for their allegiance to the company with ‘princely states’; one member of Ranjit Sigh’s court, Gulab Singh, was allowed by the British to purchase the region of Jammu and Kashmir as a reward for his actions against the Sikhs, establishing the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1846. Akbar II presided over a single city surrounded by the remnants of an empire now torn and submerged by the British machinery, and grew more depressed by the fact that his favored heir was removed by the British, and after his own death in 1837, would be succeeded by his eldest, Mirza Abu Zafar, as the 19^th Mughal emperor taking the regnal name Bahadur Shah II, more noted for his poetry than a desire to sit on the throne. Ascending to power at the ripe age of 62, Zafar preferred leisure rather rule, walking along the moonlit path of his mango groves or in court surrounded by poets such as Mirza Ghalib and Dagh –likely why the British had placed him as head of the Timurids. As their long and proud tradition of massive progenies had left thousands of minor royals to live in squalor within the walls of the Red Fort, lodging protests of their appalling conditions to the British Resident, Mughal power was now so feeble that in 1852, Zafar struck an agreement with the British to allow his favorite Mirza Fakhru to the throne, who in return would move the royal court “to the distant suburb of Mehrauli, handing over the old fort of Shah Jahan to the British, who would use it as a barrack and a powder magazine”, and drop the title of king to “Governor General”, though after the crown prince died before he could do so, the British hoped extinguishing the crown with Zafar altogether.[42]

In a colonial attitude, whilst hoping to replace indigenous rule, the British had made few attempts to make themselves even remotely appealing or relatable to their new subjects; under the façade of Mughal rule they pushed Christianity, imposed harsh taxes forcing people to turn to banditry, and while the annexation of Avadh in 1856 riled Muslims, it also riled Hindu soldiers serving in British forces “drawn from upper caste Hindu families in rural Avadh, and who now found themselves compelled to reduce their own country to vassalage.”[43] Rumors arose of the British forcing indigenous soldiers (sepoy) to violate their religious practices by biting into bullet cartridges laced with beef and pig grease, with the spreading resentment exploding in March 1857 after Mangal Pandey, a sepoy in the Bengal, was executed in an effort to incite rebellion. His actions stirred the sepoys into action, and that May, the 3^rd Bengal Light Cavalry revolted in Meerut against the British and arrived in Delhi, wreaking havoc wherever they went, looting and chasing down Europeans to butcher them. They proclaimed Zafar as their king, who reluctantly agreed, though the majority of Muslim populations elsewhere did not follow suit; rather, the majority of Pathan and Punjabi Muslims, along with the Sikhs, actively aided the British effort in ending the rebellion, while the smaller states and army regiments who joined the rebellion were overwhelmingly Hindu, such as the Maratha Rani of Jhansi, the rebel general Tatya Tope, and the Rajputs in Bihar leading pockets of resistance outside Delhi. The only major Muslim opposition to the British was mostly concentrated in Delhi, where the Jama Mosque stoked rebellion as members of the royal family, inching for power, reassumed positions of prominence. Within the royal court opinion also divided: the eighty-two-year-old Zafar had begrudgingly accepted the hordes of sepoys eagerly arriving in Delhi and his more ambitious sons actively participated in the rebellion, while both his prime minister and chief consort secretly sided with the British. These inexperienced princes would have a minimal role in the rebellion, quickly being supplanted by the hardened general Bakht Khan, after their leadership left Delhi starving and chaotic. The British forces arrived, besieging the city that June, where despite being heavily outnumbered, no other major modern conflict in the subcontinent would exhibit such a resounding clash between two sharply distinct worlds: the modern west, moved by scientific research and technological innovations, would no pummel the antiquated east, bound by mysticism and failing to realize their obsolete methods. Lacking the basic supplies required to hold the seemingly impregnable city, discipline within the ranks of the Mughal forces was poor; senior officers endlessly bickered and outmaneuvered one another while soldiers threw themselves to the enemy as directionless hordes of sheep waiting to be mowed down by British cannons. Even Zafar grew disinterested in the fighting and hopelessly depressed, and on September 14^th, the British successfully penetrated the city, prompting Zafar to flee for Humayun’s tomb, only to surrender to Company officers soon after. In a final act of savagery, the chief British negotiator William Hodson, would murder the three princes who took part in the rebellion in cold blood, stripping them of jewels and hanging their corpses along the gates of Delhi. Zafar was brought back to Shah Jahan’s fort no longer a king, placed in a cell to be ogled at by the passing British and given a kangaroo trial, which found him guilty of supporting the sepoys and punished him with exile, shipping off the last of the Timurids for Rangoon, where the last Mughal emperor died in 1862 after four agonizingly miserable years in squalor. With the fall of Delhi signaling the end of the rebellion, the British spent the following months swiftly extinguishing rebellious fires throughout the former lands of the Mughals –anywhere they resumed power was followed by equally horrific atrocities, executing rebels by firing them off into the sun through a cannon or executing them in the streets of Delhi. The bazaars of Delhi, once a roaring cultural hub of Mughal excellence, now traumatized and swarming with vengeful British officers roaming the ghost town readily shooting any non-Europeans on site, would never truly recover from the trauma.

While British domination could be boiled down to just a handful of key events, the story of their superiority and of Mughal deterioration goes far deeper, yielding a plethora of lessons, especially for the Muslims of the subcontinent. While Akbar had initiated a program of religious tolerance, his ultimate failures in striking unity lay in that he failed to take into account the significance that religion played in politics, and in the lives of members of his court, while his accommodations to certain elite groups would only further empower them, carrying devastating consequences for his successors. Chiefly to their failures was that although the Mughals had commissioned groundbreaking architectural works standing tall as confidence towers of the triumph of their prosperous empire, unlike the halls of faraway Cordoba or the libraries of Baghdad, the Mughal empire never emerged as a major intellectual center of learning or scientific development. Many of these efforts pursued by the Mughals, while giving way to moving pieces of innovate artwork changing the face of the subcontinent, or patronizing the development of Persian literature of an outstanding quality which helped craft another language, Urdu, these accomplishments largely were, much like the development and advancement of the Mughal armies and the sprawling palaces, built to serve a single purpose: for the tranquility of the emperor, to guarantee his comfort and security –while Aurangzeb’s role in this was negligible, his ventures in the south and a weak pool of succession both failed to consolidate Mughal control at the center.

As rival powers rose around them, the Mughals, no doubt an enduring centerpiece of Muslim political power, had left their people ill-equipped to deal with such challenges intellectually and politically, enjoying an utmost level of comfort when the British arrived, readily advancing with cannon fire and gun powder, and their final fall was a slow and agonizing one, drawing but a whimper from the Muslims at large, who would indefinitely become politically crippled. Ultimately, with the Mughals failing to unite internally and adapt externally to the changing world around them ending their line, today the only existing photographs of a Mughal Padshah are those of broken one, confined in captivity and robed in the clothes of peasantry. One by one, the subcontinent’s great powers of old fell before the ruthlessly efficient British machinery, their empty thrones and chipped crowns paling before the glistening lights of London.

Chapter 2.

Rise and Fall - The British Raj, 1858-1947

“As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power.”

- Lord Curzon

The 1857 rebellion would be the last serious challenge posed to British authority, with the victory cementing the Company’s absolute rule after peeling away nominal Mughal authority. Wisely, the British found it more prudent to administer the wealthy subcontinent directly, doing away with Company rule altogether after passing the Government of India Act of 1858, which placed the subcontinent, otherwise known by its Greek moniker ‘India’, directly under the administrative control of the British crown as its possessive territory. The British Raj over the subcontinent essentially split between the Viceroy, the crown’s ‘representative’ administering rule areas under their direct control, and hundreds of princely states spanning much of the subcontinent, ruled by handsomely rewarded elites for their alliances with the British. Under this system of feudalism, (zamindar) glorified landlords and former nobles were now vassals to the British crown, pledging their allegiance to it and operating under British sovereignty, while retaining a certain autonomy over their own realms, minting their own currency and maintaining their own troops –so long as they left British authority unchallenged. The aristocracy altered by this shift, with nobles holding the English dress, language and mannerisms in high regard, eagerly accepting civil and military awards specifically tailored towards British Indian subjects, and gleefully leaving for England to kneel before their new overlords in accepting knighthoods. While practicing ‘democracy’ back at home, in the subcontinent the British supported and molded this system of feudalism inherited from the old empires to their liking, purchasing the aristocracy’s support with elaborately fancy titles whilst keeping the masses dull and content, irreparably harming their social progress. However archaic and detrimental, this form of rule was highly effective for the British in consolidating power through the many loyal Maharaja Hindus and Sikhs and Muslim Nawabs, who despite governing over financial and military powerhouses of their own, would dutifully stand by the crown until the very end, starkly evident in 1876, when Queen Victoria adopted the title Empress of India and held an official coronation to signify this change in authority, (the Delhi durbar) where despite not attending the event herself, presided over by the Viceroy riding through Delhi on an elephant to signify British power over the former Muslim capital, the coronation attracted both European dignitaries and the hundreds of Nawabs and Maharajas, who flocked at the opportunity to refresh their undying pledges to the crown.

Outside the halls of the Nawab’s palaces, loyalty to the crown was not shared amongst many Muslims, reeling from the physical deterioration of their political power in the aftermath of the rebellion. And rather than take steps to approach them into their new fold, the British blamed Muslim populations for inciting the rebellion far more than any other religious community, marking them guilty by association as a Muslim king had been the face of it, with sentiments of political unification throughout Muslim lands, threatening Britain’s political dominance only adding to the suspicion. This acrimonious relationship meant that Muslims resented the British and what was associated with them, refusing to learn their language or come to grips with the new order, causing them not to advance in the raj’s earlier years, unlike the Parsees and Hindus, (whose larger population was not seen suspiciously for its role in the rebellion for obvious reasons) who were far less hesitant and more welcoming to the British, encouraged to learning English and were admitted to the bureaucracy at greater numbers; leading businessmen were mostly Parsees or Hindus, and among the first British Indian subjects to the join civil service or serve as judges were Hindu, whilst Muslims faced economic and systematic discrimination.

Aligarh Movement

Since the 1750s, the shift in governance from what was once a Muslim empire perplexed religious scholars who pondered if the land was still under Muslim rule, as the answer could change the heading of Islamic life in the region. Cleared altogether with the British openly assuming control, with no Muslim government truly in place, religious thinkers hastened towards different avenues of Islamic revivalism to reclaim their political glory; some turned to a physical jihad and waged war on the British, while others amongst the Orthodoxy responded ideologically, establishing the Deoband movement in 1866. Stressing Islamic revival could be reached through strongly relying on traditionalist ideas, the movement rigorously opposed mystical Sufi practices and rejected the British as harmful to the religion. Among Muslims, their largest opposition arose under Syed Ahmed Khan, who pushed for the opposite, arguing Muslims should instead reconcile with British rule and use the new invaluable resources at their disposal (primarily modern education) as a means to understand and implement modern ideas, as they were key to their social advancement and survival in this newly shaping world quickly globalizing. Although born into the Mughal elite, Syed quickly realized Britain’s scientific and technological advances made them far superior to anything offered by the subcontinent, and much to the protests of his family, promptly left to work for the British bureaucracy. Like many Muslims he held nostalgic dreams of Mughal revivalism, which would be dashed away completely with the 1857 rebellion. In its the aftermath, Syed drafted what would perhaps the most crucial piece a literature for Muslims and the British, a pamphlet titled Causes of the Indian Revolt. Whilst condemning the rebels, Syed rejected accusations that the rebellion was part of a planned Muslim conspiracy, pinning the event as a product of exclusionary British policies disseminating through their expansionist policies. A callous disregard towards their colonial subjects had caused “universal discontent” and seriously unchecked “grievances” to rise against them, leading to greater levels of mistrust and eventually, rebellion. Muslim reconciliation, Syed wisely advised, would only be possible if the British dropped their attitude of suspicion and empathetically encouraged Muslim social development while welcoming them into the administration at larger numbers, and if they amended their aggressive policies to be more inclusive, he urged the Muslims should realize this an opportunity, and approach them willingly to rebuild their own community using the shining new modern tools at their disposal.[44]

Syed would spend the remainder of his life refuting the traditionalist Orthodoxy, even establishing religious schools which mixed scientific study and modern education with religion, all in an effort to challenge traditionalist stances he viewed as ritualistic superstitions with pragmatism. His exhaustive efforts resulted in the Aligarh Movement, in which Muslims, breathed with a new air of intellectual life, were motivated to welcome modern education for socioeconomic and political prosperity by gathering the intellectual tools needed to confront modern challenges. The movement spread throughout the subcontinent from the city of Aligarh, where Syed established the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (MAO) in 1875, the subcontinent’s first institute of higher education for Muslims, later endowed as the Aligarh Muslim University in 1920, becoming a buzzing hub of Muslim intellectual activity. In the contexts of both its time and location, the MAO was an unprecedented effort for this era; just less than two decades after the fall of a major symbol of Muslim power, in the heart of British India rose a Muslim-led University offering a chance for Muslims to rise up and be reborn from its ashes, electrifying the Muslim intelligentsia, as many of its educated and sophisticated alumni would play a significant part in the fortunes of Muslim political activity in the coming decades. Syed faced enormous criticism (especially from the Orthodoxy) on both his political outlook and concepts on Islam and the Caliphate, which he condemned for straying from its original purpose and being “degenerated into [a] hereditary monarchy”.[45] Such statements, along with his open embrace of the British and eagerly accepting civil awards, (including a Knighthood in 1888) made at a particularly sensitive era for Muslims towards British rule, affronted established norms and sentiments, ostracizing Sir Syed from the orthodoxy and their masses, though his efforts had done the insurmountable task of carving an effective and practical path for Muslims to follow in accepting and confronting the challenges of modernity. As British India Hindus continued excelling far past the Muslims in this new world, by the 1880s, influenced by western ideas of nationhood, a new ideology of ‘composite nationalism’ began taking shape amongst their intelligentsia, who claimed, (much like Akbar had) that the subcontinent’s religious divisions could be overlooked and thereby overlooked if wider society united in bowing to serve a different higher power; the state, which would make their great numbers a formidable power, enough to petition the British to attain greater rights. Highly educated Hindus, with the support of Englishmen patriotic to the Raj, came together in 1885 to establish an indigenous political platform, the Indian National Congress, originally serving as a stage for wealthy businessmen to petition the government, the party would quickly assume the cloth of composite Indian nationalism.

Given that Hindus significantly outnumbered Muslims, (the largest minority population) the obvious concern was to not ignore the deep religious divide and starkly divergent historical experiences between Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities that had existed in the subcontinent for centuries and simply tuck these mutual grievances under an amalgamative nationalism molded by secularism. In the immediate decades following the rebellion, Hindus and Muslims had been on somewhat sympathetic political grounds, though after the formation of Congress and its composite nationalism, fears began bubbling amongst Muslim leaders that Congress, dominated by Brahmins would steamroll over Muslim concerns, leading them to reject coalition offers with the party. One concern was Congress’ “demand” to create elected houses of parliament for British India, on that grounds that “Muslims being a minority would be outvoted by the Hindu majority in every department of the State”, leaving their interests to be controlled and represented by Hindus alone. Even the British themselves, (albeit for their own reasons) argued against introducing their own elected systems of government verbatim, as it could not take into account the “hostile” religious differences of British India, with the absence of Muslims leading Congress to be dubbed a “Hindu party” by both Muslims and western press.[46] In 1861 the British introduced advisory legislative councils, and in 1892 responded to Congress’ many petitions by expanding the council and adding nominal powers, which the party viewed as a small victory towards electoral representation. However, Muslim participation in the councils remained pitiful; in their heavily populated province of the Bengal, Hindus outnumbered council seats 5 to 1, and led Muslims to grow fearful of Congress influence on the British administration, as it had allowed the party to nominate “the same leaders, whom the Muslims had denounced as sedition mongers”. With an aura of suspicion and mistrust between both communities, Muslim leaders concluded they required certain electoral ‘safeguards’ to ensure their representation, lest they be “swept away by the rising tide of the Congress movement”. Bolstered by their larger numbers in the administration, popular Hindu ‘reformist’ groups cropped up soon after, claiming Muslims as ‘foreign invaders’ and calling for a ban on cow slaughter, stoking tensions to increase communal riots between Hindus and Muslims sparked by claims of religious desecration, leaving European observers to note that both communities were “separate nations more distinct and spiritually further assunder than two European nations.”[47]

Discouraging Muslim participation in the party, Syed viewed the Hindu political influence on Congress harmful to Muslim interests, and established a political party promoting independent Muslim political growth alongside closer ties with the British.[48] Although he stressed religious tolerance between these two “principal limbs of India”, Syed could not shake the fear of Hindu majoritarianism, and in the midst of his opposition to Congress’ electoral proposals, he prophesized in 1888 that if the time came for the British to leave the subcontinent, it would be wishful thinking in hoping that either community could refrain from violence, as the “two nations” would be unwilling to share power amicably, deteriorating relations towards an immediate rush to “conquer the other and thrust it down”, proposing that “peace” could only arrive after “one nation had conquered the other and made it obedient”. But until the time arrived for a British exit, Syed advised Muslims to educate themselves, heighten their positions along the socioeconomic ladder and in the administration, and bolster their political participation to function independently enough to appropriately prepare and intellectually equip their communities if that great clash ever arrived.[49] Nurturing and emphasizing the importance of Muslim social development along modern lines as a means for their survival in the modern world, Syed provided both a challenge and answer to members of the orthodoxy who clung to superstitious beliefs, realizing that Muslims were doomed to repeat the Mughal fate if they failed to grasp a dominant position in the new world. Although he died just before the dawn of British India’s most electrifying century, Syed was of critical importance for the sociopolitical advancement of Muslims with astounding outcomes, instrumental in creating a generation of learned Muslims, later to become talented academics themselves, and further motivating the Muslim elite as it began shipping off to Europe in pursuit of higher education. In turn, this emerging sophisticated and highly educated Muslim class motivated by Sir Syed’s educational reforms would help alter the course of Asia’s history.

An Indigenous Rise

Congress rose to greater prominence in 1892 after a founding member, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected in British Parliament as its first British Indian Member. A proponent of composite nationalism, India’s ‘Grand Old Man’ had criticized the raj for its treatment of colonial subjects as property and investment, stressing the need to alleviate the massive economic burden they had imposed on their colony, halting a GDP once accounting for a quarter of the world’s economy under Aurangzeb. Trouncing imperialist narratives wherever he went, Dadabhai’s electoral victory and stirring speeches in Westminster moved scores of young British Indians, particularly students studying abroad in England, among them one Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Born to a modestly successful Gujarati merchant family settled in Karachi in 1876, Jinnah initially showed no aptitude towards pursuing an education, abruptly ditching class to enjoy rides on “his father’s Arabian horses”, though after being enrolled into the prestigious Christian Mission High School, was eventually given an opportunity to leave for England through a business apprenticeship.[50] At sixteen, the young apprentice arrived on British shores in 1893, where after a wander along the halls of Westminster, he became utterly immersed into the world of politics by Dadabhai’s enthralling speeches, prompting him to abandon his apprenticeship and enroll in Lincoln’s Inn to train as a barrister and pave an entry into politics. Disregarding his father’s pleas to return home, Jinnah proceeded to bury himself in his books while adopting the culture of Victorian London, ditching his Gujarati clothes for fine-stitched Saville Row suits, assuming a refined English accent and mannerisms, shortening his name to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and even taking an interest in performing on stage. In just two years, Jinnah emerged as British India’s youngest qualified barrister and quickly set sail for Bombay, where, as the city’s only Muslim barrister, he soon made a name for himself after winning a case representing the influential politician Pherozeshah Mehta.

Politically, the rising young barrister emerged an ardent Indian nationalist, initiating his political involvement after attending a Congress meeting in 1904, a time when the party was busy transforming its image from Hindu elitism to composite nationalism. The party faced a major setback in 1905, when Muslims in the Bengal, whose commercial interests had been long dominated by the Hindu business, successfully petitioned the British to partition the Bengal along religious lines, in an act that went against the theory of composite nationalism as the British recognized religious divisions were deeply entrenched and unsolvable. Empowered by this victory, in 1906, prominent Muslims including the students of Sir Syed gathered in Dacca to form the All India Muslim League, initially to protect Muslim commercial interests from Hindu dominance. A coalition of educated upper-class Muslims, nobles, religious leaders and scholars, such as Muhammad Ali Jauhar, the Agha Khan and the Nawab of Dacca, whilst seeking to protect commercial interests through political participation, the party had also achieved a landmark victory, convincing the British to guarantee Muslim representation in local government by establishing separate electorates as their safeguards, explicitly reserving a proportional number of electable Muslim seats in legislature.

Unconditionally committed to composite nationalism and by far the most outspoken Muslim member of Congress around, Jinnah condemned both the creation of the Muslim League and separate electorates as “dividing the nation against itself”.[51] So encompassing was his commitment to nationalism that it ran far above mere ideological disagreements; in 1907 Congress split along the lines between two of its prominent leaders, the more moderate Gokhale, and Tilak, a Hindu nationalist, which viewed ‘India’ an ancient land of and belonging to exclusively the Hindus, sidelining Muslims and Christians as ‘foreign invaders’, seeking to inject Hinduism into national politics for fear that, despite belonging to the majority, Hindus would somehow be politically suffocated by these ‘outsiders’. Amidst Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1890s, Tilak “urged the Hindus to organize themselves under the banner of Hinduism to fight the Muslim menace”.[52] Jinnah sided with Gokhale, though his deep commitments to nationalism overlooked Tilak’s political differences, representing him on charges of sedition. However, these commitments began to be tested, firstly with Jinnah’s election in 1910 –ironically through the very same channels of separate electorates he once vigorously opposed– to the Legislative Council from Bombay, from where he would bloom the seedlings of his political career. Practicing probate law, a great number of affluential clients were attracted to Jinnah’s chambers, many of them the wealthy Muslim elite with whom Jinnah established close relations, and who likely influenced him to propose and later pass his first piece of legislature in 1913 on behalf of the Muslim community; the Wakf Validating Bill. As his ingenious skills in court and political involvement grew, members of the League began persuading Jinnah to join the party, made more urgent by the fact that it had suffered a devastating political loss; in a response to Bengal’s partition, Hindu nationalists had formed a political party of their own, the Hindu Mahasabha, claiming to protect Hindu interests by reuniting the Bengal. The rising political influence of Hindu businessmen whose pockets had been cut by the partition and now backed Mahasabha protests, soon became evident during King George V’s 1911 Delhi durbar, where his majesty announced Bengal’s reunification, along with (without a whiff of irony) shifting the Raj’s capital to Delhi, as Calcutta had become far too infested with communal rioting. The moved applauded by Congress, once more businesses in the Bengal became dominated by Hindus, and Britain’s quick abandonment of the League’s concerns became so alarming to Muslims that in 1912 Jinnah attended sessions of both the League and Congress, hoping his dual participation could bridge the gap and bolt indigenous politics under one platform, which would be crucial before moving towards self-governance. As the League presidency shifted to Sir Muhammad Shafi, a fiercely loyal British advocate, Jinnah used his influence in the party to give it a more liberal and tolerant outlook, and the League, seeing his political aptitude and understanding the potential of his contribution, finally convinced Jinnah to join the party in 1913 –ever the ardent nationalist, Jinnah joined only after making it clear his work towards securing Muslim interests would only come second to his efforts on Hindu-Muslim unity; his unprecedented efforts to strike an understanding between both groups under a commitment to unity prompted Gokhale to praise Jinnah as the “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.”

The Great War

Although a member of both parties, Jinnah paid much larger care to Congress, where his amplified reputation had given an opportunity to be sent off west for talks with the British government –arriving at its shores once more, Europe suddenly broke out in total war. The British diverted full attention to the war effort, and sought to gather public support for British Indian recruitment drives through the help of leading politicians such as Jinnah and Mohandas K. Gandhi, the barrister known for his efforts in apartheid South Africa, where he had unrivalled success in separating British association of his countrymen to the indigenous Africans on the grounds that they were inferior.[53] His name proceeding him, upon a triumphant return to British India, in what would be the first among many interactions with Jinnah, the pair immediately felt discord, for at his welcome party Gandhi had singled out Jinnah as a ‘successful Muslim’, “informing every one of his minority religious identity” in the process –although his intentions were likely not to insult, Jinnah felt slighted at Gandhi’s perceived inability to overlook communal lines, especially towards a man who physically resembled more a westerner above all else.[54] The Ottoman Empire, whose monarchy was unable to sustain itself amongst a rapidly industrializing Europe, was now overtaken by an ambitious western-inspired group, The Young Turks. In an effort to save their struggling empire, the group plunged the dying monarchy into the war in 1914 –placing Indian Muslims in a perplexing position in the process, as the Caliph had begrudgingly announced a Jihad, calling all capable Muslims to arms. In 1915, two prominent British Indian brothers, Shaukat & Muhammad Ali Jauhar, openly claimed support for the Ottomans and the revival of the Caliphate, leading to their prompt arrests, though their outspokenness stirred the sentiments of Muslim communities and riled their involvement in politics.

Among the more outspoken proponents of composite nationalism, Gandhi sought to attract Muslims to Congress, leaping at the opportunity to strike a political coalition with the Ali brothers, while also seeking to retain relations with the British, similar to how he had previously participated in British imperial conquests in South Africa as means to strengthen his movement –it was quite the contradictory position; Gandhi was encouraging his fellow subjects to heed Britain’s call for war whilst joining a group protesting against them. Differing with Gandhi, Jinnah refused supporting the war effort so long as the British did not treat Indians as equal subjects of the empire. Once more, Jinnah’s loyalty to nationalism would be tested; while his efforts within the League led to his ascendancy as its president in 1916, he was left alienated in Congress after Gokhale’s death and Dadabhai’s departure to London, leaving the party to fall under the leadership of Motilal Nehru, a prominent Hindu barrister. Although remaining committed to striking unity, after his re-election to the Legislative Council Jinnah became open to the idea of separate electorates, agreeing that Hindus should accept it as a gesture of goodwill to open trustful relations with Muslims. His countless hours towards striking unity between both parties paid off handsomely as he reached the apex of his political career in October 1916, after a joint session of both parties signed the Lucknow Pact agreeing to grant Muslims greater electoral rights, a landmark step bringing reconciliation under a single, unifying political platform one step closer.

Jinnah’s star-bound political and professional career accompanied dramatic improvements in his personal life; begrudgingly married as a young man only to be widowed while studying in London, Jinnah filled his life in Bombay with endless piles of work, though in the summer of 1916, struck love for the first time to the daughter of an affluent Parsi friend from Bombay, Sir Dinshaw M. Petit, during a stay at the family’s chateau in Darjeeling. Petit’s daughter, known as Ruttie, was well known in Bombay for her beauty, intellect and involvement in local politics, through her father rejected her choice of Jinnah, citing an age gap of nearly 25 years and Jinnah’s religion –she rebelled; two years later upon turning eighteen she left home, converted to Islam and married Jinnah in 1918 at his posh South Court Bombay residence. The pair instantly become a famed match amongst the city’s elite circles, especially after their first direct participation in civil disobedience in November 1918, organizing a rally to shut down an event honoring the outgoing Governor of Bombay infamously known for his prejudices. A resounding success, Jinnah emerged a local hero and was honored by the residents of Bombay with the creation of a People’s Memorial Hall that still stands, forgotten among the streets of Mumbai. The following August, precisely 28 years before the date culminating the entirety of his lifework, Jinnah’s daughter Dina was born. Had they struck a coalition, Jinnah and Gandhi would have likely empowered British Indian politics enormously, yet that partnership never arrived, as wedges drove between the pair’s political views, initially due to their disagreeable stance on supporting the war effort. At the war conference in Delhi, Gandhi coaxed Jinnah to his side, encouraging him to “seek ye first the recruiting office and everything will be unto you”, leaving the latter “too shocked to respond”. Ultimately, Gandhi would abandon his recruitment drives for the imperial forces through the countryside after experiencing mass rejection from the locals.[55] The Great War reaching its roaring conclusion, British victory meant irreparable Muslim loss: Ottoman lands were eviscerated and claimed by local monarchies propped up by the victors, whom the British eventually abandoned anyway, signing the Sykes-Picot agreement to partition some Muslim lands between Arab monarchs but assume control over large portions of the middle east amongst other western powers, crucially including the holy lands of Palestine. The sad remnants of the Ottomans, signing several humiliating agreements at Versailles, ignited a war of independence in May 1919 to prevent further evisceration by the Allied powers under the command of Major General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In British India, the breakup of the empire propelled Muslims into political action; fearing the Caliphate’s extinction, and spearheaded by the freshly released Ali brothers, the Khilafat Movement was launched in an effort to rally Muslim support and launch protests pressuring the British to help preserve the Caliphate.

Non-violence

To quell concerns by indigenous politicians pushing for self-governance, in 1919 parliament passed another act on British India, this time a series of reforms bringing it closer to self-governance by adding two houses of legislature while retaining certain powers themselves, thereby splitting administration between the Indians and the British, though the act did little to satisfy many Indian politicians who felt the reforms did not go far enough, especially as the British administration had also extended its repressive, draconian wartime measures. Once more, Jinnah and Gandhi arrived on diverging paths, this time far more drastic and definite: Jinnah resigned from his seat at the legislative council in protest, while Gandhi embarked on his famous nonviolent civil disobedience movement (Satyagraha). Jinnah disagreed from agitating the British colonial force, who would respond brashly as the movement tore up communication lines, first violently clashing with protestors, and later mowing down thousands of unarmed men, women and children, killing hundreds and extinguishing entire families gathered at Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh in point-blank range. Committing among their worst imperial atrocities against humanity, the destructive massacre would be referred to by the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford “an error of judgment, transitory in its consequences.”[56] As the decade closed out, Gandhi and Jinnah would find themselves on widely diverging ideological methods; Gandhi’s agitative politics sought to rile the masses to rise up in protest and pressure the British for change, while Jinnah, observing the masses of British Indian society as economic subjugated and frightfully socially underdeveloped, insisted that practical change should only be derived through constitutional methods; legislative reforms such as compulsory education that could cultivate social development, helping progressively form an environment where the people themselves were fully prepared for self-rule –the difference was crucial, because as they were meant to yield fast results, Gandhi’s methods did not take into account of what would occur after the British exit, though the events of the massacre convinced him they should leave immediately, while Jinnah, insisting they should first surmise what this post-independence state would look like, did not call for immediate British withdrawal. Based on the events of the previous three decades, without British involvement this independent state would practically be in shambles, steeped in civil conflicts spurned by political disagreements based on religious divisions.

In response to the massacre, Congress distanced itself from the British and Gandhi increased his protests, launching a mass non-cooperation movement in September 1920. Once more to draw Muslim support, he struck an alliance with the Khilafat Movement, successfully attracting swathes of Muslims to protest alongside Hindus. While Jinnah voiced support for the Caliphate, denouncing its “spoilation” as an offense against the faith and the humiliating treaties it was forced to sign as “unchivalrous and outrageous terms”, what he rejected in principle was the Khilafat Movement’s populist tendencies by operating alongside Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement.[57] Against the waves of anarchy and populism that had gripped British India, Jinnah observed Britain’s backlash to be severe and sensed danger, urging the British to deescalate the situation by initiating talks with Indian politicians, and openly opposed Congress’ decision to adopt Gandhi’s of non-cooperation as policy, arguing it would only lead to further anarchy, unrest, distrust and ultimately delay self-rule. His advice would fall on deaf ears, as the party had now completely changed course by falling under Gandhi’s spell, who, relying on the emotionalism behind his non-cooperation protests, had successfully brought a popular appeal to Congress. While Jinnah was supported by some leaders within Congress who opposed vesting Gandhi with such absolute power, the party, largely falling before populist whims, ignored Jinnah’s passionate arguments speaking cold hard logic, which claimed that injecting the vastly unlettered masses into national politics on a level unintelligible to them would have a divisive effect on society. To him no longer the party he once energetically joined, after being heckled off the stage at its December session in Nagpur, Jinnah finally resigned from Congress.

By publicly prophesizing Gandhi’s non-cooperation would end in disaster, Jinnah’s political star had temporarily fallen into the depths, shunned even from the League, whose many members had denounced him as they flocked to the Khilafat Movement; while Gandhi roamed the countryside dressed as a fakir, Jinnah had been reduced to a persona non grata in the realm of British Indian politics. Time would prove his assessment to quickly emerge as the correct one: Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement failed to produce any tangible outcomes; boycotts on rejecting to join schools or shut down the administrative system were countered with increased enrollments, and his countrymen serving in the administration “remained entirely loyal to the British raj that paid it.”[58] The British had established numerous universities and schools providing adequate access to modern education, built among the world’s largest railway systems linking almost the entirety of the subcontinent, maintained a modern justice system and law enforcement providing swift results along with an impressively expansive irrigation system empowering the rural backbone, making it unsurprising that, despite this all was geared to keep the lights on bright back in London, many of British India’s economically disadvantaged did not ignore utilizing such modern facilities that could improve their lives. Jinnah could not remain silent on Gandhi’s failed movement, but rather than leap at the chance to rejoice in his redemption, proposed several offers to Gandhi in an effort to end the movement –only to be repeatedly rejected. Undeterred, Gandhi would not accept defeat to end his movement until the horrific events of February 5, 1922, when two dozen charred corpses emerged in the town of Chauri Chaura after a violent confrontation between protestors and local police. Jinnah’s urge for restraint going ignored as the fanatics had become too out of control for Gandhi to handle, the fiery crisps of Chauri Chaura smoldered the pair’s relationship to permanent deterioration. Finally calling it off, left in the wind by Gandhi’s abrupt announcement to end the movement, the Ali brothers felt abandoned, as the Khilafat Movement, blocked from placing any further pressure on the British by Gandhi’s exit, sputtered to a silent end as the victorious Ataturk inaugurated a secular Turkey, which in 1924 would constitutionally abolish the once-enduring Caliphate from existence.

Betrayals to a New End