Akbar Proclaims the Mahzar

1579

Akbar issued the Mahzar, a decree declaring himself the final arbiter on disputed questions of Islamic law in the Mughal Empire. Conservative ulama were horrified. The emperor, now thirty-seven, was consolidating religious as well as political authority, and moving toward his syncretic Din-i Ilahi experiment. The decree subordinated the ulama's traditional authority to imperial judgment, a revolutionary assertion of secular power over sacred law.