Akbar's religious tolerance and administrative reforms

Date

1564 (jizya abolished); 1582 (Din-i Ilahi)

Category

Politics & governance

Region

Mughal India

Era

Early Modern

Significance

During his long reign (1556–1605) the Mughal emperor Akbar built one of the most powerful and inclusive states of the early modern world.

Seeking to govern a vast Hindu-majority empire, he abolished the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya poll tax on non-Muslims in 1564, appointed Hindus and Rajputs to high office, and married into Rajput dynasties. He promoted the doctrine of sulh-i kul, or universal peace, and founded the Ibadat Khana, a house of worship at Fatehpur Sikri where scholars of many faiths debated. In 1582 he proclaimed the Din-i Ilahi, a small syncretic court cult drawing on several religions, though it gained few adherents. Akbar also overhauled revenue collection and the mansabdari ranking system that organised the nobility and army. These reforms gave the Mughal Empire administrative coherence and a measure of communal harmony that underpinned its prosperity and influenced ideas of pluralist statecraft in South Asia.

Empires active in 1564 (jizya abolished); 1582 (Din-i Ilahi)

• Songhai Empire
  1464 CE – 1591 CE
• Ming Dynasty
  1368 CE – 1644 CE
• Ottoman Empire
  1299 CE – 1922 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• Mughal Empire
  1526 CE – 1857 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related politics & governance events

• Aurangzeb, the Mughal apogee and the seeds of decline
  1679 (jizya reimposed); reign 1658–1707
• Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years' War
  October 1648
• The Peace of Augsburg
  25 September 1555
• The New Laws and the debate over the encomienda
  20 November 1542
• The English Reformation: Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy
  1534
• Suleiman the Magnificent and the codification of Ottoman law
  1520–1566 (reign of Suleiman)

Further reading

The Mughal Empire

The wider story

The Mughal Empire

John F. Richards

The standard scholarly survey (New Cambridge History of India).

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