In the last five decades, South Asian countries have experienced a notable increase in religious violence and discrimination. The most well-known cases involve the Muslims in India, the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, the Rohingyas in Myanmar, and secularists and atheists in Bangladesh. During this time, the ideals and institutions of secularism have decreased in political utility and popular appeal. In Pakistan, in 1974, a democratically elected government held what amounted to a heresy inquisition before amending the constitution to excommunicate the Ahmadiyya. Even though the Indian constitution is secular, the state organized a grand ceremony in 2024 to inaugurate a Rama temple built on the site of a mosque razed by Hindu activists. It also implemented a controversial citizenship law that offered amnesty to illegal immigrants on the basis of religion and excluded Muslims.
The liberal or modernist position that favors secularism in South Asia has steadily lost ground to religious nationalism. In India, the liberal position was built on a vaguely defined civilizational essentialism that holds that India has, for millennia, produced indigenous means of sustaining religious pluralism that made it conducive to modern forms of secularism. This view offers as evidence two era-defining rulers from pre-modern times—the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (r. 268-232 BCE) and the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605)—who forged political unity out of religious diversity. Nevertheless, this vision of history does not explain what was particularly Indian about the political solutions crafted by men like Ashoka and Akbar. In Pakistan, a hurriedly created country with two wings separated by a thousand miles, a stable historical narrative was even more difficult to sustain.
Postmodern and postcolonial scholarship routinely blames religious conflict on the nation-state system. As the argument goes, under Western colonial rule, secular governance reified religious difference and engendered communal conflict in non-Western societies. In this view, postcolonial states made matters worse by continuing the policies of the colonial era. The solution to religious violence, by this logic, is not more secularism but less. It has even been argued that humanity should embrace a good form of Orientalism and turn to the ethics enshrined in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism to escape the amoral hegemony of the nation state.
These modernist and postmodernist visions of politics and religion are built on highly romantic readings of premodern pasts. By contrast, I present a view of the Mughal history unburdened by nationalist concerns or postcolonial guilt and use it to rethink the terms of the contemporary debate.
In the 1580s, the Mughal emperor Akbar instituted the controversial policy of “total peace” (sulh-i kull) with all religions. Under this policy, the empire formally declared the end of discrimination based on religious identity. An officer of any religion or sect, Muslim or otherwise, could join the Mughal empire at the lowest ranks and rise to the highest without changing religious affiliation. Moreover, the empire forbade religious violence and even protected heretics and apostates from Islam, a policy that was inconceivable in any other Muslim- or Christian-governed empire of the sixteenth century. The Ottomans, for instance, required conversion to Sunni Islam as a sign of loyalty for serving in the military or in high office and even held grand circumcision ceremonies. Similarly, the Safavids mandated conversion to Shi‘ism on pain of death for noble and commoner alike, and required the public cursing of Sunni figures. The perpetual wars and tensions between Catholics and Protestant Christian powers are too well-known to be rehearsed here.
Against this global background of politics shaped by religious zeal, let us consider the nature of the Mughal policy of “total peace” with all religions. To start, the Mughal approach was the precise opposite of modern secularism. Instead of disenchanting the public sphere, it took an enchanted view of all public matters. Instead of declaring religion to be a matter of individual conscience, it acknowledged all religions to be ritually efficacious. Instead of expecting all citizens to act like atheists in political matters, it expected all imperial subjects to demonstrate their loyalty by praying for the empire in their own style. In other words, what the Mughals promoted was not the privatization of religion but rather a very public sacralization of the state, by all cosmic means possible.
Indeed, several Mughal emperors openly worshipped the sun and drew upon the magical powers of the planets. Yet this does not mean that the Muslim dynasty of the Mughals had gone “native” in India and embraced Hinduism. Instead, they turned toward their ancestral past in Inner Asia and resurrected the imperial practices of their Mongol ancestor, Chinggis Khan, who had treated all the religions of his vast Asian realm as equally efficacious ways of entreating heaven. Moreover, the Chinggisid dynasty fashioned for itself a “free association” with heaven that was not dependent on any organized religion.
From the perspective of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even Buddhists, Mongol religious attitudes threw up a series of paradoxes: the Mongols seemed to act like pagans while taking an interest in all religions. They accommodated all religions because they did not follow any religion themselves; they were not atheists but did not accept the exclusive truth claim of any religion. Suffice it to say, the analytical categories of scriptural religions and specifically biblical monotheism broke down before these conundrums. The religious philosophy that could make sense of this new world order was Neoplatonism, which witnessed a major renaissance in the Mongol and post-Mongol Muslim empires, and especially in the realm of the Mughals. In short, the Mongol-Mughal position toward religion came not from a proto-secular worldview but a neopagan one.
To understand this neopagan turn, it is helpful to use a three-part schema for the state management of religion: sacred kingship, the religious state, and the secular state. In sacred kingship, the ruler is considered the most sacred person in the polity, with a direct relation with the cosmos. Ancient Egypt is the oldest and longest-lasting example of this cosmotheistic paradigm, but it can be found in all ancient civilizations that venerated the cosmos—especially the sun, moon, and the planets—as aspects of the divine. A sense of the one true religion was absent from this paradigm. Importantly, law lay squarely in the domain of kings; there was no concept of theocracy or direct rule of the gods.
The idea of the religious state and theocratic rule emerged when sacred kingship came under intense criticism during the Axial Age. Between the middle of the first millennium BCE and Late Antiquity, scriptural religions propagated by prophets and philosophers swept across Eurasia. A major development of this time was the advent of biblical monotheism, which defined itself in opposition to cosmotheism and rejected the divinity of the cosmos as well as that of kings. The original text of biblical monotheism, the Hebrew Bible, casts Pharaonic kingship as the worst form of politics and seeks to replace it with the theocratic rule of the one true God, making it the duty of the king to recite scripture all day long. Similarly, the Quran uses the title of “deputy” or caliph (khalifa) for a righteous ruler, emphasizing his subordinate and profane status. Christian and Islamic states introduced a new type of violence. Now, only one religion and one God’s law could reign supreme; all other religions had to be demoted or banned outright.
The modern secular state came into being as a solution to, among other things, the religious persecutions and holy wars unleashed by the religious state in Western Europe. It demoted, privatized, or in extreme cases banned religions. Not only was the secular state imagined to solve the violence of the religious state, but it also learned the art of disenchantment from the religious state. Biblical monotheism partially disenchanted the state when it put an end to sacred kingship. It had banned the king from performing any priestly function or claiming an exclusive connection to the cosmos—to be a son of heaven or the living law—and instead erected the edifice of revealed law and the church. The secular state took the partial disenchantment caused by the religious state to its logical conclusion and rejected the authority of the church and revelation wholesale.
The three-part scheme of sacred, religious, and secular politics corresponds to three different degrees of enchantment of the state: total, partial, and none. What this scheme also reveals is a commonality between sacred kingship and the secular state. In relation to the religious state, both sacred kingship and the secular state are non-theocratic. This is why sacred kingship—including in Ashoka and Akbar’s empires—can appear akin to “proto-secularism” and secular politics akin to a “return to Pharaoh.”
Let us now briefly consider what transpired under the Mongols. The Chinggisid conquests had disrupted the order of the Islamic state across Muslim Asia by destroying the Abbasid caliphate (750 to 1258), the longest-serving institution of sovereignty in the history of Islam. The Mongols did not displace Islam, but parochialized it by refusing to acknowledge its theocratic mission. They also pressed all religions into the service of the state to sacralize the ruler. Once sacralized, the king could then enact policies to lessen religious friction among his subjects. Sacred kingship, as this case shows, was violent toward the proponents of the religious state, for whom only one scriptural religion could reign supreme.
When the Mughals revived the Mongol imperial model for managing religions, they did so by commissioning a major historical research project into Mongol history. In the resulting historical narratives, they praised the Chinggisid way of allowing for all religions to co-exist as equals. The Mughals also sacralized the ruler above all religions. They chose the year of a major cosmic event, a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that coincided with the end of the first Islamic millennium, to unveil the new dispensation in which there was to be total peace. Not all Muslims and Christians were happy with this new turn of events. One Jesuit missionary at Akbar’s court lamented that the emperor “cared little that, in allowing everyone to follow his own religion, he was in reality violating all religions.”
Mughal total peace lasted for the better part of a century, but its effects were felt for much longer in the elite literary and bureaucratic culture it created. It was gradually forgotten in the nineteenth century, with the advent of British rule. By the twentieth century, the thoroughly enchanted mode—astrological conjunctions, solar veneration, magical rites, ruler worship, and so on—in which it had been enacted made it something of an embarrassment. Modern intellectuals can bear to describe it only in “respectable” terms, either as inspired by Sufi mysticism or as a practical form of proto-secular politics.
Yet Mughal total peace was a specimen neither of a proto-secular state nor of a religious one. It was an unadulterated form of sacred kingship. It satisfies neither the secular needs of liberal nationalism nor the asecular desires of postmodernism. What the Mughal-Mongol example teaches us, however, is that there are three difficult choices for a state to make when it comes to the management of religion. If the state serves the pious believers, the unbelievers must suffer. If the state allows for all belief, the pious must be made to suffer heretics and apostates. If the state allows for no belief, only the atheists are left to rejoice. No romance with history will make these choices any less fraught.