Mughal Empire and the Taj Mahal

# The Mughal Empire: Islam and India's Golden Age

The Empire That Defined South Asian Islam

The Mughal Empire (932-1274 AH / 1526-1858 CE) was the most powerful Islamic state in South Asian history and one of the three great Islamic "gunpowder empires" of the early modern world, alongside the Ottoman and Safavid states. At its peak under Aurangzeb (r. 1068-1118 AH / 1658-1707 CE), it was the world's largest economy and governed perhaps 150-200 million people — more than contemporary Europe. Its architectural legacy includes the Taj Mahal. Its legal legacy includes the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri. Its spiritual legacy includes the reform efforts of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (the Mujaddid Alf Thani) and Shah Waliullah Dehlawi. Understanding the Mughal Empire means understanding the history of Islam in the Indian subcontinent.

Babur and Humayun: Founding and Near-Collapse

Babur (r. 932-937 AH / 1526-1530 CE) established the empire through military genius — winning the First Battle of Panipat (932 AH / 1526 CE) with artillery against a numerically superior Delhi Sultanate force, then defeating the Rajput confederacy at Khanwa (933 AH / 1527 CE). He died four years after conquering Delhi, leaving his son Humayun a still-fragile kingdom.

Humayun (first reign 937-946 AH / 1530-1540 CE) was a complex man — learned, generous, interested in astrology and philosophy — who proved unable to consolidate the empire. He lost India to the Afghan leader Sher Shah Suri at the Battle of Chausa (945 AH / 1539 CE) and was driven into exile. He spent fifteen years in Safavid Persia and Afghanistan, dependent on Shah Tahmasp's hospitality (at the price of converting a part of his following to Shia practice, which he did tactically). He reconquered India in 962 AH (1555 CE) after Sher Shah's empire fragmented. Then he died in an accident — falling down the steps of his library — only six months after recapturing Delhi, in 963 AH (1556 CE).

Akbar: The Great Controversy

Akbar (r. 963-1013 AH / 1556-1605 CE) was the ruler who genuinely established the Mughal Empire as a stable, prosperous, and institutionalized state. He reformed the revenue system (the zabt system, codified by his finance minister Raja Todar Mal), created a professional administrative class (the mansabdari system), extended the empire through conquest and diplomacy across most of the subcontinent, and presided over a remarkable cultural flowering.

But Akbar's religious policies are deeply problematic from the Ahl us-Sunnah perspective. He removed the jizya (the tax on non-Muslims that, in classical Islamic governance, distinguished Muslim from non-Muslim status under Islamic rule). He banned the killing of cows throughout his empire to accommodate Hindu sensitivities. He promoted marriage alliances with Rajput Hindu princesses without requiring their conversion. And most seriously, he developed what he called Din-i-Ilahi (Religion of God) — a syncretic spiritual movement that combined elements of Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Jain principles, with Akbar himself at its center as a spiritual guide.

Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (971-1034 AH / 1564-1624 CE), known as the Mujaddid Alf Thani (Reviver of the Second Islamic Millennium), organized the Sunni scholarly and Sufi response to Akbar's religious experiments. Through his voluminous Maktubat (Letters) addressed to Mughal nobles and officials, Sirhindi argued systematically that Akbar's Din-i-Ilahi was incompatible with Islam, that the removal of jizya was a violation of Islamic governance principles, and that Sunni scholars had a duty to resist the syncretist drift. His efforts bore fruit under Akbar's grandson Aurangzeb, who reversed many of Akbar's religious innovations.

The Ahl us-Sunnah assessment of Akbar is that his administrative achievements were genuine and his personal qualities admirable in many respects, but that his religious experiments represented a serious deviation from Islamic principles that had real consequences for Muslim identity in the subcontinent.

Jahangir: Art and Weakness

Jahangir (r. 1013-1037 AH / 1605-1627 CE) was a man of refined sensibility and acute aesthetic judgment — his memoirs (the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri) show a genuine connoisseur of painting, music, and nature. The Mughal miniature painting tradition reached its peak under his patronage. But he was also an alcoholic and drug addict who admitted these failings in his own memoir with unusual frankness.

His reign was characterized by delegating actual governance to subordinates — first to the powerful queen Nur Jahan (born Mihr un-Nisa), who effectively ran the empire for the last decade of his reign, and to his nobles. His treatment of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi was ambivalent: he briefly imprisoned Sirhindi (apparently pressured by nobles alarmed by the Sufi reformer's growing influence) before eventually releasing him with honor. The episode reflects the tension throughout the Mughal period between the Sunni reformist impulse and the court's broader cultural syncretism.

Shah Jahan: The Builder

Shah Jahan (r. 1037-1068 AH / 1628-1658 CE) is remembered above all as the builder of the Taj Mahal — the monument he erected to his wife Arjumand Banu Begum (known as Mumtaz Mahal) who died in childbirth in 1040 AH (1631 CE). Built over twenty-two years (1040-1063 AH / 1632-1653 CE) by a workforce estimated at 20,000 workers, the Taj Mahal is a testament to the wealth and artistic ambition of the Mughal court at its height. White marble from Rajasthan, precious stones from across Asia, Persian calligraphers and Mughal craftsmen — the building synthesizes Islamic architectural principles (the dome, the minarets, the axial garden layout) with local Mughal traditions in a way that produces a result unlike anything before or after.

Shah Jahan also built the Jama Masjid in Delhi (completed 1066 AH / 1656 CE) — the largest mosque in India — and the Red Fort in Delhi, which became the seat of Mughal imperial power. His architectural patronage was matched by his military ambitions: he conducted campaigns in the Deccan and attempts to reconquer the former Timurid capital of Samarkand that proved costly and ultimately unsuccessful.

He was deposed in 1068 AH (1658 CE) by his son Aurangzeb and spent the remaining eight years of his life imprisoned in the Agra Fort, from which he could see the Taj Mahal. He died in 1075 AH (1666 CE) and was buried beside his wife.

Aurangzeb: The Last Great Mughal

Aurangzeb ibn Shah Jahan (r. 1068-1118 AH / 1658-1707 CE) is the most disputed figure in Mughal history. For traditional Sunni Muslims, he is the model of pious Islamic governance: a ruler who tried to implement the Shariah, who lived with personal austerity, who spent his private hours copying the Quran by hand (the handwritten Qurans he sold provided his personal income — he refused to use state funds for personal expenses), who reintroduced the jizya removed by Akbar, and who brought the empire to its greatest territorial extent. For Indian nationalist historians, he is a religious bigot who destroyed temples and imposed an alien Islamization. Understanding him requires careful historical engagement with both perspectives.

His Fatawa-e-Alamgiri — a comprehensive codification of Hanafi Islamic law compiled by a committee of scholars under his direction — is one of the great achievements of Islamic jurisprudence in the subcontinent, running to thirty volumes and covering virtually every area of fiqh. It remains a standard reference in Hanafi legal scholarship today.

His personal piety was documented by contemporaries and by himself: he prayed the five daily prayers regularly, fasted Ramadan, avoided the wine and entertainments that had characterized earlier Mughal courts, and spent his personal income on books and prayer caps he made himself. His letters, preserved in Persian, show a man of genuine religious conviction.

His military campaigns extended Mughal rule into the Deccan (the Bijapur and Golconda sultanates fell to him in 1097 AH / 1686-87 CE) and brought the empire to its maximum territorial extent — from Kabul in the northwest to Bengal in the east, from Kashmir in the north to the tip of the Deccan in the south. But the Deccan campaigns proved strategically counterproductive: they stretched the empire's resources across an enormous territory while simultaneously generating fierce resistance from the Marathas under Shivaji and his successors. Aurangzeb spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the Deccan and died there in 1118 AH (1707 CE), aged eighty-nine.

His own final letter, written on his deathbed, is one of the most poignant documents in Islamic history: "I have sinned greatly, and I do not know what punishment awaits me. I carry the sins of the oppressed and innocent... Guard the interest of the subjects and revere God... Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, I leave to you. Settle it. I am going away."

The Legacy and Decline

After Aurangzeb's death, the empire fragmented rapidly. A dozen emperors followed in fifty years. Regional powers — the Marathas, the Sikhs, the Rajputs, the Nizam of Hyderabad — asserted de facto independence. The British East India Company expanded from its coastal trading posts into regional political power. By the early 13th century AH (19th century CE), the Mughal Emperor was a pensioner of the British in the Red Fort of Delhi, with no real authority beyond the city's walls.

The last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, was deposed by the British after the Indian Rebellion of 1273-74 AH (1857-58 CE) and exiled to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1278 AH (1862 CE). His final verses, written in Rangoon, express the pathos of the end:

"How unfortunate is Zafar — for his burial / Not even two yards of land were to be had in the beloved's land."

The Mughal legacy for South Asian Islam is immense. The Persian language of the Mughal court became Urdu — the blended Persian-Arabic-Turkish-Hindi language that became the literary and religious language of South Asian Muslims. The Mughal architecture — the Taj Mahal, the Jama Masjid, the Red Fort, the Lahore Fort — shapes the visual identity of South Asian Islamic culture. The intellectual traditions that emerged in dialogue with and sometimes opposition to the Mughal court — Sirhindi's Naqshbandi revival, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi's reform scholarship — became the foundations of modern South Asian Islamic thought.

Sources:

• Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Streusand, Douglas. Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Westview Press, 2011.
• Faruqui, Munis D. The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504-1719. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Eraly, Abraham. Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals. Penguin, 1997.
• Truschke, Audrey. Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King. Stanford University Press, 2017.
• Metcalf, Barbara and Thomas Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Ahmad Sirhindi, Shaykh. Maktubat-i-Imam-i-Rabbani. Ed. Nur Ahmad Amritsari. Lahore, 1964.