The Sufi method behind the Mughal Peace with All religions: A study of Ibn Arabi s tahqiq in Abu al-Fazl s preface to the Razmnama

Abstract

The mystical method of tahqiq (realization or verification of divine truth), as promoted by the Andalusian thinker Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), was central to the project of managing religious difference in the Mughal empire. The key architect of deploying tahqiq for imperial purposes was emperor Akbar s senior minister, ideologue, and spiritual devotee, Abu al-Fazl. Specifically, I analyse how the concept of tahqiq appears in Abu al-Fazl s 1587 preface to the Razmnama (Book of War ), the first translation into Persian of the Sanskrit religious epic Mahabharata. The Mughal Razmnama was a monumental achievement, the foremost product of Akbar s push to translate non-Islamic religious works into Persian. In its elaborate preface, Abu al-Fazl clearly outlines that this translation was an exercise in tahqiq, made possible by a sovereign who had achieved spiritual perfection, and he calls the Mughal empire a Caliphate of Tahqiq . As such, this study bridges two scholarly conversations which have been previously distinct. One is the renewed focus in Islamic studies on Ibn Arabi s ideas, specifically on tahqiq in the late medieval and early modern periods across the Islamic world. The other is the recent interest in Mughal historiography on sulh-i kull (Total Peace). This article positions Ibn Arabi s tahqiq within an elite Persianate intellectual milieu that carried the concept to Mughal South Asia, and it demonstrates, through an analysis of the Razmnama s preface, that tahqiq was politicized by Abu al-Fazl and Akbar to develop the imperial policy of managing religious difference, which came to be known as sulh-i kull.