THE DECLINE OF THE MUGHUL EMPIRE

AND SHAH WAL1ULLAH

Aurangzlb, the last great Mughul, ruled over an empire still reflecting
its past glories; his successors ruled over a mere shadow. Bahadur
Shh, finally succeeding to the throne at the age of sixty-five, faced
an unending chain of insurrection from Rajputs, Marathas, and Sikhs.
He soon gave up, devoting the last six months of his reign to gardening,
and when he died in 1712 the empire fell apart. "The story of the next
fifty years, it has been said, is one of the most piteous of all
history...1
Bahadur Shah's successor, Jahndr Shh, invited discord and
rebellion by combining brutal vengeance, prolific squandering, and
absolute incompetency. He gave his concubine an allowance of twenty
million rupees a year, plus clothes and jewels, spending much of his own
time in drunken orgies. Naturally enough, his throne was never secure;
in less than a year he had been murdered. The court split into Turanian
and Iranian factions, and the government's efficiency vanished amid its
feuding parts. Five emperors followed in seven years. The chief noble
of the court left for the south, where he set up in Hyderabad (Haidarbd) in the Deccan (Dakhan), an area as large as Italy, a state of
his own; another set up a state for himself in Oudh; the governor of
Bengal acted, at least, as though he were independent. The Marathas,
whom Aurangzb had been unable to subdue, appeared in 1737 before
the gates of Delhi, but as suddenly withdrew. Two years later Nadir
Shh of Persia, aware of the unsettled conditions to the south, marched
to Delhi, and the emperor, Muhammad Shh, the asylum of
negligence,2 saw his capital sacked. For a long time, ran the metaphor of a contemporary historian, the streets remained strewn with
corpses, as the walks of a garden with dead flowers and leaves. The
town was reduced to ashes, and had the appearance of a plain consumed
with fire.3 Then Ndir Shh left, carrying all the Imperial gold plate,
the Koh-inr diamond and other jewels, the gem-studded Peacock
Throne, and anything else he chose to carry on the innumerable horses,
elephants, and camels which he also took back to Persia. So far had the
mighty Mughul Empire fallen ! Muhammad Shh, with a tired eye
towards the future as the riches of his Empire traveled slowly northward and westward, issued a Royal Order which proclaimed: All
public officers should occupy themselves in the discharge of their
ordinary duties, except the historians. These should refrain from
recording the events of my reign, for at present the record cannot be a
1 H. G. Rawlinson, India, A Short Cultural H istory, London, 1952, p. 352.
2 Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, A s Told by Its Own Historians,
S. Gupta, Calcutta. This quotation is taken from the Tarikh-i-Hindi of Rustam
Ali, p. 50 in volume 19 of Guptas edition.
3 Tazkira of Anand Ram Mukhlis, p. 97, in Elliot and Dowson, as above.

!!

116

THE MUSLIM WORLD

pleasant one.4 From this blow (delivered, interestingly enough, by

other Muslims) the Empire never recovered.
After the departure of Nadir Shh the condition of the government
was worse than before. The amirs took what they liked. The Emperor
spent what remained to him in sports and pastime.5 Within twenty
years of this defeat in 1757 Delhi (Dihl) was captured by the
Marathas, but the triumph was ephemeral. Four years later the third
Muslim victory at Pnpat this one led by Ahmad Shh Abdl, the
founder of Afghanistan crushed for all time the power of the Marathas in northern India. Nothing else came of the victory, however,
for sick and unpaid the Afghan soldiers insisted on returning home.
Bbur in 1526, and Akbar in 1556, at the first and second battles of
Pnpat, had each won an empire, but even though the third battle
in 1761 was also a victory for Muslim arms, it is as good a date as any
by which to mark the end of the Mughul Empire as a live force. It
lingered on that is, the court lingered 011 but both Muslim and
Hindu were exhausted, and the last half of the eighteenth century
saw the British begin to establish their supremacy over each.
This painful collapse of the Mughul Empire forced extended re fleetion on those orthodox Muslims who were not content merely to hide
themselves in the swamps of qismat. All Muslims were bewildered,
even though they continued to look to Delhi as the final arbiter. The
matter must have been doubly perplexing because the collapse followed
so suddenly, indeed, in some ways preceded, the death of Aurangzlb
to the orthodox the most truly Islamic of all the Mughul rulers. The
waning of the empire revived again the questions that had plagued
Indian Muslims from at least the fourteenth century, and produced
a second great Muslim theologian on the subcontinent, whose orthodoxy
was beyond reproach, but whose emphases, as a result of his study of
the circumstances in which he lived, differed slightly from theologians
before him.
Ahmad ibn cAbd alRahim, more commonly known as Shh
Waliullah, the deputy of God, was born four years before the death
of Aurangzb and died the year after the third battle of Pnpat. His
life spans the period during which the deterioration of the Empire, and,
consequently, of Muslim society, was most rapid. He searched for some
way by which his society could be strengthened, and could, as a theologian saw it, once again be reconciled with Islam.
Shh Waliullahs father was a Sf and a scholar who had at one
time worked in Aurangzbs court, helping to compile a code of Hanaf
law one of the great achievements of that monarch's reign. Court life
did not appeal to Shh cAbd al-Rahm, however, and he soon left to
4 Tarikh-i-Chaghatai of Muhammad Shaft0, Teheran!, pp. 19-20, in Elliot and
Dowson, as above.
5 Tarikh-i-Ahmad Shah, p. 103, in Elliot and Dowson, as above.

THE DECLINE OF THE MUGHUL EMPIRE

117

set up a school of his own, at which he tried to find some way by which
the fs and the orthodox the mystics and the legalists could be
brought together, a pursuit his more famous son was to carry on after
him. 6
When Waliullah was seventeen his father died; by that time the boy
had memorized the entire Q ur3n, had been married, had completed
the highest course offered in any Muslim school in Delhi, and had
begun teaching the study of hadith literature traditions of Muhammads life at his fathers school. He continued teaching until 1730
when he went on pilgrimage to Arabia, staying there for fourteen
months to further his studies of the hadith. In 1733 he returned to
Delhi. For the last thirty years of his life he devoted himself to the
study of Islamic subjects, to attempts to buttress the waning empire,
and to writing. 7
Shh Waliullah was a transitional figure between the medieval
and the modern age, somewhat as Dante was in Europe. 8 In today's
Pakistan all groups, whether fundamentalist or not, claim intellectual
descent from him. But Waliullah was not a modernist; it is only that
his analysis of his own troubled times developed a position modernists
were later able to develop for their own ends. His religious viewpoint
was genuinely orthodox and did not differ much from that of the first
great Muslim theologian of India, the fervent critic of Akbars strange
attempt to create a syncretistic faith for political purposes, Shaikh Ahmad of Sirhind. Indeed, Waliullah and Sirhindl were both members of
the Nakshbandl order of Sfs. However, Shaikh Ahmad lived in a time
when Muslim power was approaching its zenith; Shh Waliullah lived
in a time when that power was close to its nadir. Each man applied
himself to the same question how can Islam be strengthened?
and from the same religious position, but Waliullahs mind seems
to have been more far-reaching, and approached the question of the
dynamic character of Islam from a more analytical or, perhaps, less
Arabicized point of view.
Waliullah can best be described as a scholar-revolutionary. His times
cried for revolution, and he patiently and continually wrote letters
and pamphlets noting what was wrong with his society and suggesting
6 Pakistan Historical Society, A History of the Freedom Movement, vol. 1, p.
493, quoting cUbaidullah Sindhi.
7 Muhammad Ishaq, India's Contribution to the Study of Hadith Literature,
Dacca, 1953, pp. 172-178.
8 There is very little literature in English on Waliullah. That which is most
accessible are the two chapters in A History of the Freedom Movement, vol. 1
one by S. M. Ikram and one by Khaliq A. izam; Muin-udDin Ahmad Khan,
Shah Wall-Allahs Conception of Ijtihd, Journal of the Pakistan Historical
Society (vol. viii, no. 3) July 1959, pp. 165-194; Fazlur Rahman, *The Thinker of
Crisis-Shah Waliy-Ullah, Pakistan Quarterly (vol. vi, no. 2) pp. 44-48. Some
brief translations have appeared, notably a translation of selected passages from
cIqd al-Jd by Muhammad Daud Rahbar, Shah Wall Ullh and Ijtihd, The
Muslim World (vol. xlv, no. 4) October 1955, pp. 346-358.

118

THE MUSLIM WORLD

means by which conditions might be improved. Some strong action was

necessary if the power of the Muslims was to be regained, and all
his life Waliullah worked to achieve that end. His pen may have been
instrumental in bringing about the third Battle of PnTpat. He wrote
to Ahmad Shh Abdl, inviting him down from Afghanistan to destroy
the Maratha army: We appeal to you in the name of God to divert
your attention to this affair and earn the glory of waging a holy war
and rescue the Muslims from the hands of unbelievers. The undertaking should not resemble the invasion of Nadir Shh ( 1 7 3 9 ) who
destroyed the Muslims and left the Marathas and the Jts intact. I
fear the day when, if the Muslims become still weaker, no trace of
Islam would remain. 9
Action such as this represented an attempt to save the Muslim
community from being overrun before it could regenerate itself. Of
far greater interest are Waliullahs ideas on this regeneration.
For a sincere and pious Muslim theologian there was only one solution to the problem of the Muslims in India: to achieve the government
that had marked the Muslims during their golden days. This did not
mean returning to the balmy days of the Mughul Empire, but to the
days of the early Muslim caliphate in Arabia. It has been pointed out
that while Christians have generally sought their utopias in some unknown future, Muslims have generally sought theirs in a definite past.
Quite likely this reflects less an essential difference between the two
faiths than a stage in historical development, for neither did the medieval Christians write utopias, although they looked with longing on the
Church Fathers.
Religiously speaking, the golden days of the Muslims were those
twenty-eight years of the early caliphate ending with the assassination
of CA11, the fourth caliph and Muhammads son-in-law, in the year 661.
Waliullah believed that one of the great causes of the weakness of
Muslims had been the substitution of kingship for the early caliphate.
Homage was paid to a king whether he deserved it or not, but the early
caliphs, he believed, had been chosen on the basis of ability. What he
wanted was to regenerate the spirit behind the social and political organization of those times when Muslims were filled with faith and acted
with unity.
He did not believe that a literal return to the conditions of the early
caliphate was possible, or, in itself, particularly Islamic so far as India
was concerned. He thought of Islam as a pure, universal religion,
though one presented to the world in an Arabic pattern. No religious
tradition, he argued, can occur in a vacuum, and the fact of a religion
being presented in one cultural pattern in this case, Arabic does
not mean that it is forever tied to Arabic customs and procedures. In
9
Quoted in Mohammad Yasin, A Social History of Islamic India, Lucknow,
1958, p. 175 ; see also Freedom Movement, vol. x, 512-544.

THE DECLINE OF THE MUGHUL EMPIRE

119

different cultures the pure religion will be expressed in different ways,

and even in different times of the same culture.10
The great question, of course, is how to pluck that which is the pure
religion from that which is m erely the cultural pattern. To chis Shh
Waliullah apparently had no answer, but in raising the question
(although it had earlier been reflected in Hanafi thought, and even
earlier in the Sunni-Shcah split) he opened the doors for almost unlimited speculation.
In an attempt to secure the diffusion of Islamic ideas outside of
the Arabic cultural pattern, Shh Waliullah translated the Q ur3an
from its original Arabic, which few Muslims in India understood, into
Persian, the language of the aristocracy. This move, w^hile it incensed
many of the fundamentalist theologians (who believed God's word
should not be tampered with in any way), proved a popular one. Two
of his sons each translated the Q ur:)an into Urdu, the new language
rapidly replacing Persian in India as the Mughul power eclipsed. Perhaps these later translations into the vernacular of the people were even
more revolutionary than Waliullahs pioneering effort. The medieval
Muslim aristocrat, like his medieval Christian counterpart, distrusted
the influence of widespread knowledge. Nothing should be done that
might encourage the lowborn to move from their place. It was felt that
learning would prove to be too equalitarian, rulers would lose prestige,
and God's social order would be ruined. 11 The translations of Wali
ullahs sons indicate that this medieval concept, so far as it related to
enough learning to enable one to read the Q ur3an, had been overthrown.
One of the reasons for the weakness of his own society, Waliullah
believed, was that there was too much high living part of the price
paid for the success of the Mughuls. If only the truly Islamic customs
and practices could be restablished, then most certainly the power
and authority that were fast seeping away from the Muslims in India
would be restored to them. By strengthening Muslim society Waliullah
meant to strengthen the Muslim faith. That was his ultimate purpose,
for if the faith were strong, so, too, would be the community. The
strengthening of Muslim society would mean that many Hindu customs
that had been accepted by Muslims on the subcontinent, such as the ban
on the remarriage of widows, would be abolished. Waliullah wrote in
opposition to expensive engagements, expensive weddings, the high
cost of alimony, and expensive funerals. None of these things was a
part of early Islam, and their removal could only strengthen the Muslim community in India. It is indicative of the man, however, that his
10 This aspect of Waliullahs thought was seized upon by Mauln Iqbl in his
efforts to develop a dynamic concept of Islam. See The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lahore, 19S1, pp. 171-172.
11 Barni, Fatawa-i-Jahandari, folio 130a; Muhammad Bakir Khan, Mauizayi-Jahangiri, folios 29-31 as quoted in W. T. de Bary, ed., Sources o f Indian
Tradition, N ew York, 1958, pp. 517-518.

120

THE MUSLIM WORLD

opposition to such practices was not because they were Hindu, but because they were unislamic. He was not motivated by the bigotry that
was part of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhind. In his greatest work, the encyclopedic H ujjat Allah al-Baligha, he cites reasons for the decline of the
Roman and Ssnid Persian empires : the problems of succession, high
living, unjust taxation, misery among peasants and artisans, the influence of social parasites. But there is no need to repeat these old
stories, he wrote, when you are seeing now all these things in the
lives of the rulers of your cities. 12 Repent ! cried Waliullah to the
nobility reform your ways ! To the lower classes he advised prayer,
work, and sound economic practices so that the religious injunction to
pay alms might be met and that there would still be a little saved for
emergencies.
Waliullah saw, too, that more than high living and more than the
absorption of Hindu customs had weakened his society. There was no
real unity among the Muslims; indeed, the community was divided
against itself. The four principal Sufi orders paid little attention to
each other, and, even so, the fs faced a running battle with the
orthodox who, in turn, warred on both the $fs and the Sh1cah.
Waliullah hoped to achieve unity among the divergent Muslims by
emphasizing early Islam before the Sufis had become important,
and before the Sunni-Sh1cah split. The scholar in him constantly
emphasized the spirit of balance it was a matter he constantly
emphasized and he took pains to point out that balance, in the sense
of justice or fairness, exists in all aspects of life. He never became, like
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhind, or like his contemporary reformer in Arabia,
Muhammad ibn cAbd al-Wahhab, the pure revolutionary who sees things
only as black or white. Indeed, it is not an unfair comparison to say
that Shaikh Ahmad is to Xavier as Waliullah is to Erasmus.
Conciliation, except in dealing with elements of political disruption
that seemed to threaten Islam, such as the raging Marathas, Jts, and
Sikhs, was the hallmark of Waliullah. Among the problems over which
orthodox and Sfs quarreled wras one that had appeared long before,
and one that Shaikh Ahmad Sirhind thought he had effectively settled.
Shaikh Ahmad had maintained that the mystics were wrong when they
argued in such pantheistic terms as the unity of existence; this was all
illusion. There was instead, he argued, a duality of existence: creator
and created were separate. Nevertheless, many Sfs did not accept his
argument, and this old dispute continued to simmer. Waliullah sought
to resolve it by showing that both sides were right it all depended
on how one looked at it.
Both views were based on true revelations, he maintained, and that of
Shaikh Ahmad actually confirmed that of Ibn rArab1. If real facts,
12 H u jja t Allah al-Bligha, vol. 1, as cited in A History of the Freedom
Movement, vol. 1, p. 519.

THE DECLINE OF THE MUGHUL EMPIRE

he wrote, are taken into account and studied without their garb of
simile and metaphor, both doctrines will appear about the same.13 It
has been said that what Waliullah did was to give a philosophical and
Sufistic base to Islamic orthodoxy. 14
He tried not only to resolve the disputes between $fs and orthodox,
but between Sfs themselves. He was too much the Indian himself
to reject mysticism, but he did hope to promote co-operation among
members of the mystic orders. Initiated into each of the four primary
f orders on the subcontinent himself, he started the practice of
initiating novices into each of the orders simultaneously a practice
that has been continued by the Muslim theological school started at
Deoband in the wake of his influence.
A further example of the conciliatory technique of Waliullah is seen
in the fact that, contrary to the customary practice of the orthodox of
his day, he never maintained that the Sh1cah were not Muslims. He
steadfastly refused not to classify them as Muslims, and as a consequence was awarded one of the lowest epithets in the orthodox vocabulary that of being one of the S h 1 ca h ! 1 5 The profound respect
and esteem in which Waliullah was held in all Muslim religious circles,
however, greatly weakened the effect of any opposition raised against
him.
Besides high living and internal dissensions, Muslim society, in
Waliullahs opinion, suffered from a rigid conformity to interpretations
made in other ages and other areas. Waliullah recognized that growth
and change were essential for a healthy society; he did not believe that
Muslim society was strengthened by a blind following of one or another
of the four schools of Muslim jurisprudence. In this respect he did
not differ from Sirhindi, nor from Ibn al-Wahhab in Arabia, who also
considered the blind following of the medieval authorities to be an
element of weakness in Islam. Perhaps the greatest impact Waliullahs
thought had on the Muslims of India lay in his views concerning the
right of an individual to form an independent judgment on a legal
question, that is, to exercise the right of ijtihd. To most of the orthodox theologians the individual scholar had no such right; the last word
on the subject had been said by the end of the tenth century, and since
then the gates of ijtihd, the gates on the path leading to independent
judgment, have been closed. So long as the rigid conformity existed,
however, the social elasticity which his sense of balance recognized as
essential for good health could not exist. This elasticity he tried to
introduce through his interpretation of the principle of independent
judgment.
13 Sources of Indian Tradition, p. 462; adapted from Visva-Bharati Annals,
IV, pp. 35-36, 1951
14 S. M. Ikram writing in A History of the Freedom Movement, vol. 1, p. 498.
15 A History of the Freedom Movement, I, p. 499-500. The source of this story
is cAbd alcAzTz, one of Waliullahs sons.

122

THE MUSLIM WORLD

All in all, perhaps the most striking thing about Waliullahs ideas
was that, although completely the theologian, he thought of society in
sociological terms. Religious injunctions, he maintained, were to be
observed not necessarily because they were divine in origin, but because
of the benefits they were calculated to confer both to the individual
and to society. Islamic commandments, he wrote, are not tests merely
to reward those who pass and to punish those who fail. The purpose
of the commandments is social, to bring benefits to society and to the
individuals who make up society. There was nothing unislamic about
this view. Indeed, the celebrated historian Ibn Khaldn had written
much the same thing four centuries earlier. For if religion encompasses
all things, as Islam teaches, then it must certainly encompass this. By
his revival of this emphasis, and because of his own tremendous reputation as a scholar and a pious Muslim, Waliullah provided a nontheological foundation upon which later thinkers, more removed from
strictly theological premises, could build. If Islamic commandments
exist to provide social benefits, then the test of a commandment becomes
how successfully it does this. In a world in which cultural patterns are
being buffeted from all sides this becomes a very severe test.
Waliullah believed that the slavish adherence of the learned theologians to the opinion of the medieval jurists endangered his society. It
was their job to search in the hadth literature and the Q ur3an for the
pure religion itself, and to apply it to their own time and place. This,
of course, might involve by-passing the medieval jurists a really
radical move, although hardly unique, in his time. For the individual
who has not properly studied his faith that is, one who has not
devoted his entire life to Muslim theology the assistance of a learned
man is essential, but only because of the latters knowledge of the Book
of God and the Sunnah. Waliullah, although he believed in the absolute
clarity of the Q ur3n, never went so far as to say that no more was
needed. Characteristically, however, he did offer a conciliatory alternative to the theologians, hoping to achieve a little gain if he couldn't
achieve a big one. The four primary schools of Muslim jurisprudence,
he said, should be treated equally by the theologians, and exclusive
attention should not be given to any one of them.
Waliullah hoped, by breaking the rigorous hold of the medieval
jurists on Islamic thought, to introduce sufficient elasticity into Islam
in India to permit it to adapt itself to new times and new conditions. He
wanted a reform, but he does not seem to have wanted any major
change. Nevertheless he pointed out the ways by which individuals,
more involved in the ripening social changes than the Muslim theologians, could logically advocate reforms far in excess of anything of
which he dreamed. W hat Waliullah considered as sufficient elasticity
later reformers considered hopelessly insufficient. Actually, two strong
movements developed as a result of Waliullahs teaching. One, that
most directly connected with him, became increasingly conservative,

THE DECLINE OF THE MUGHUL EMPIRE

123

increasingly literal in its approach; the other became increasingly

liberal, increasingly abstract in its Islamic interpretations. His own
efforts to rejuvenate the Muslims of his time except, perhaps, in an
ephemeral manner in the political field were largely failures, yet
for all this his influence remains supremely great on Indian and
Pakistani Muslim thought.
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts

reeland

bbott

Copyright and Use:

As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use
according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as
otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement.
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the
copyright holder(sV express written permission. Any use, decompiling,
reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a
violation of copyright law.

This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permission
from the copyright holder( s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of ajournai
typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However,
for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article.
Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific
work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered
by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the
copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available,
or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).
About ATLAS:
The ATLA Serials (ATLAS) collection contains electronic versions of previously
published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS
collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association
(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the American
Theological Library Association.