Chapter 6 Religions of South Asia 223Sufi saints often combined powerful religious authority with political
ambitions. One famous Sufi was Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur (d. 1505),
with a following of thousands who led a movement against Akbar, the greatest
of the Mughals. As a young man Sayyid Muhammad had led a band of 1,500
Hindu ascetics into battle against a Hindu raja. When he hacked open the
Hindu raja’s chest he discovered the image of a Hindu god carved on his heart.
This so shocked him that he went into a trance: if a Hindu could be this devout,
what could devotion to the true God do for a Muslim? He left on a long spiri-
tual quest to Mecca, where he declared himself the awaited Mahdi (Moin
2012:108). Back in India, he claimed anyone who did not accept him as the
Mahdi was no true Muslim.
Babur’s grandson Akbar was also part of the cultural milieu of Sufi Islam.
In addition to being a brilliant conqueror who expanded the Mughal territories
in India and created an effective state organization, he used Sufi practices and
symbols in creating a “messianic sovereignty” along the lines of Sayyid
Muhammad of Jaunpur. He, too, could go into a “divine rapture,” which he
did in full view of the public while on a hunting trip in 1578. The Akbarnama,
the chronicle of his reign written toward the end of his life, reports that a year
after this divine rapture, he issued an edict declaring himself “the imam and
mujtahid” of the age (Moin 2012:139). Akbar invited religious leaders from all
over his empire to court to discuss their doctrines: Shias, Sunnis, Sufis, Hindus,
Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists, and even Portuguese Jesuits from Goa (who
were confident Akbar would convert to Christianity). He did not convert to any
of these creeds but was keenly interested in all of them. Rather, he gathered
them using his own charisma as emperor (padishah) with high spiritual status.
To enhance his spiritual status he created an imperial order of disciples who
greeted each other with the phrase “Allahu Akbar,” which means “God is
Great,” but also suggests “Akbar is God.”
Akbar was certainly more Sufi than Sunni or Shia. He lived at the time
when the first thousand years of Islam were coming to an end, considered by
Sufis as a time ripe for a mahdi. He was the first of the four “Great Mughals,”
followed by Shah Jahan, Jahangir, and Aurangzeb, who died in 1707. Already
in Aurangzeb’s time, the charismatic, mystical openness of Akbar’s form of
Islam was giving way to a stricter form of Islam. By the end of the eighteenth
century, British power in the form of the East India Company was changing
political and economic conditions for the Islamic elite as the final Mughals
went into decline. Indian Islam began to change in the uncertain times, and
new Muslim identities and values emerged.
Sunnis and Shias in Colonial India
In British India, before Independence and Partition, the Shias were few in
number: not more than 4 percent of Muslims in any of the provinces (Hasan
1996). The highest percentage was to be found in Lucknow, where in the 1882
and 1921 censuses, Shias were 10 percent of the Muslim population. And yet,