SHAIKH AHMAD SIRHINDI’S ROLE OF REFUTING THE BID’AT: THE CASE OF AKBAR’S DIN-I ILAHI

Abstract

This paper focuses on Emperor Akbar's innovation and promotion of a new religion "Din-i Ilahi” that was, according to the Muslim orthodox, against the basic canons of Islamic scriptural message. Akbar’s motivation and intention behind this new configuration, and the alteration in Islamic and the Quranic basics, was just political rather than religious. His new wave towards the transformation and so-called religious reformation, “Ṣulḥ-i-kul," (absolute peace) was just that he wanted to have stability in autocracy and strengthen his administrative grip. He knew how a Muslim ruler could govern over the Hindu majority country. To have a strong relationship with a predominant nation, he tried to attract them with new tact and propagated so-called brotherhood, interreligious harmony, and tolerance by mingling it with the mysticism, philosophy, and nature- worship. Conversely, the response and reaction of Muslims in general and Sufis in particular, exclusively, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, to that new cultic milieu, was categorically heretical, strongly exhorting and condemning. He rejected and defamed Akbar’s new religious theory and exposed his worldly drives to the Muslim Ummah. This article will also highlight the teachings of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi regarding the liabilities of a Muslim ruler as he proposed the Quranic teachings and strictly instructed that the Islamic Sharia and theology should be implemented against the secularism and syncretism in the subcontinent.