Akbar the apostate

Due to its circular life-giving omnipresence, the Sun appeals to all mortals. Hence, almost every religious tradition has a rich conceptual apparatus to associate the Sun with the divine through direct or indirect veneration. Like the universal sciences such as astronomy (being everywhere) and mathematics (being nowhere), reflections about the Sun and its light offer an opportunity to truly speak across religions. Having said that, the very universality of sun symbolism almost invalidates any serious scholarly attempt to detect cross-cultural influences. For example, almost every imperial tradition has analogies that link the Sun's central position with that of the king, the Sun's light with his rule, and the rising and setting of the Sun with the rise and decline of empires.Footnote ⁶ Perhaps not as widespread as these analogies and metaphors is the actual belief in cosmological correspondences, but even that was fairly mainstream at the Islamic courts, in particular at the Timurid courts that preceded those of the Mughals. Much less common, though, was worship of the Sun, either directly as a deity of its own or indirectly by somehow sharing in its divine radiation. So, although the Sun as a cosmological analogy and/or metaphor is all over the place, more exceptional is the phenomenon in which one truly worships the Sun as part of a divinely animated cosmos, producing a religious cult that is not based on revelation, but on nature—thus, a very inclusive, universal cult that the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann has persuasively coined as cosmotheism.Footnote ⁷ So, while ignoring the wider usage of Sun-related symbolism, it is only this cosmotheistic dimension of Akbar's sun worship that we will explore further by addressing the following questions: Which earlier or contemporary traditions of sun worship contributed to it and what exactly was worshipped, why, how, and also when and where?

To start with the latter two questions, it was at Fatehpur Sikri, at Nauruz 988/1580, that Akbar, for the first time, publicly prostrated before the Sun. It was the result of a slow and difficult process that took at least two years. The earliest discussions about worshipping the Sun can be traced to 986/1578. Badaʾuni mentions that Akbar's interest in it was the consequence of the emperor's contact with Hindu scholars, but it had been his adviser, Raja Birbar (d. 1586), in particular who had convinced Akbar to start this pagan madness. Before Akbar bestowed the title ‘Raja Birbar’ on him, Brahma Das was a scholar associated with the Vaishnava School of Vallabhacharya who lived in Kalpi, a district near the Yamuna River. He joined Akbar at the beginning of his reign and soon became one of his main companions.Footnote ⁸ According to Badaʾuni, Birbar had a great influence on Akbar and argued that the Sun is the perfect manifestation (muẓhir-i tāmm), the life of all beings depends on its light, and thus it has the merit (lāyiq) of devotion. To the abhorrence of the conservative Muslim Badaʾuni, Birbar even advocated some further Brahmanisation by suggesting that, in prayer, ‘the face should be turned towards the rising and not towards the setting sun (i.e. Mecca)’ and that man should venerate all natural objects, even down to cows and their dung, and, by doing this, Akbar should adopt the sectarian mark and Brahmanical thread.Footnote ⁹

This idea that Akbar's sun project was the adoption of a Brahmanical idea is also suggested by two Indic sources. One is the so-called Parasiprakasha—a bilingual lexicon in Sanskrit and Persian, written by Krishnadasa and dedicated to Akbar. Krishnadasa was a member of the caste of Maga Brahmans, or ‘Magician’ Brahmans—one of the few remaining Hindu groups that were specifically devoted to the sun god Surya. Hence, not surprisingly, that work starts with a salutation to the Sun (srisuryaya namo), to be followed in the first chapter by an account of the Persian names for the Sun.Footnote ¹⁰ The second Indic reference is to the Jain thinker Siddhicandra, who narrates the story of Akbar reciting 1,000 Sanskrit names of the Sun in his Bhanucandraganicarita (Acts of Bhanucandra)—a history of Jain encounters with the Mughals. However, as pointed out by Truschke, despite such sources, there seems to have been no living practice of solar veneration among Hindu kings at that time.Footnote ¹¹ Following that observation, it would be difficult to argue that Akbar embraced the sun cult as a compromise with his numerous Hindu vassals. At the same time, there may have been a great deal of Persianate–Indic commensurability regarding kings being seen as descendants of the Sun. But, as also rightly argued by Truschke, in the case of Akbar's Persian translation of the Mahabharata, it was actually the Persianate–Illuminationist idea of divine light that was imposed on Hindu notions of the suryavamsa, and not the other way around.Footnote ¹²

It should be stressed here that Badaʾuni not only blamed the Brahmans for taking Akbar away from Islam. He also mentions the Zoroastrians for pushing their fire worship by linking it to the cult of the Kayanians, the ancient Persian kings. Indeed, it seems that Akbar gave in to them and integrated the fire ritual into his sun project, as fire ‘was one of the signs of God, and one light from His lights’. Later, Abul Fazl, Akbar's historian and main adviser, rationalised it by sharing the story of the fourteenth-century Shaykh Sharaf al-Din, who had said: ‘What can be done with a man who is not satisfied with a lamp when the Sun is down. Every flame is derived from the fountain of divine light and bears the impression of its holy essence.’Footnote ¹³

We should also keep in mind that, at this very time (1578), Akbar invited the Jesuits to join the courtly religious discussions in his recently (1575) established Ibadat Khana. In the discussions with them, Akbar realised that the pope was their highest religious authority (mujtahid-i kāmil) and, as such, could change any religious law if needed and even kings could not object to him.Footnote ¹⁴ Akbar seems to have adopted this papal model when announcing the famous decree or Mahzar of 1579, which made him the final authority on the interpretation of the law. Although he still had to operate within the constraints of Islam, it shows that Akbar attempted to emancipate himself from the jurists and, as such, it opened the gate for innovations such as his sun project in the following year. Of course, for Badaʾuni, all this was way beyond Islam: ‘Every precept which was enjoined by the doctors of other religions he treated as manifest and decisive, in contradiction to this religion of ours.’Footnote ¹⁵ In his Najat al-Rashid (Salvation of the Rightly Guided), Badaʾuni further criticised sun worship more generally but remained silent about Akbar or the Brahmins. He now used Qurʾanic verses (41:37) to reject both fire and sun worship. Having fixed movements, the Sun and the Moon are created, and hence it would be damaging and a disgrace to worship them. It would be better to worship the god who had created them.Footnote ¹⁶ Anyway, what seems very clear is that, in Badaʾuni's private view, Akbar had definitely crossed a line and had turned into an apostate.

Of course, in terms of attributing Akbar's sun project to pagan sources, Badaʾuni's polemical comment is a problematic source. It is likely that he deliberately misattributed the emperor's turn to the Sun to Hindu influences to malign him in the eyes of his Muslim followers. We also cannot take the Indic sources at face value because every religious community that came into contact with Akbar, including the Jesuits for a time, claimed that they had managed to influence or even convert the emperor. At this point, it is important to stress that, for somebody like Abul Fazl, all this was not about Hinduism affecting the emperor, but about the emperor universalising Hinduism. This also becomes clear by the way in which Abul Fazl describes Hindus: ‘In all their ceremonial observances and usage they even implore the favour of the world-illuminating sun (āftāb-i ʿālam afrūz) and regard the pure essence of the Supreme Being as transcending the idea of power in operation.’ In describing the Hindu conception of creation, he takes the Surya-Siddhanta as the most authentic tradition, in which the origin of creation derives from the Sun, with the latter sending his son to the great demon Maya, to illuminate the world.Footnote ¹⁷

On raising ceremonial practices, what do we know about the actual rituals surrounding Akbar's sun worship? If we follow Badaʾuni again, in a report related to the Nauruz of the year 991/1583, he mentions that Akbar prayed to the Sun (ʿibādat-i āftāb) four times a day (at sunrise, noon, evening, and midnight) and recited 1,001 Sanskrit names of the Sun in devotion (ḥūżūr-i dil). Apart from the ritual with which we opened our article, it should be noted that sun worship also involved a revival of Nauruz. Although Nauruz was celebrated by most Persianate rulers, it had now also become the official start of the imperial year which. This would lead in 1584 to the official introduction of the solar year, the Tārīkh-i Ilāhī (9 Rabi I, 992), to start at the Nauruz that was nearest to the accession of Akbar, which was 21 March 1556 (9 Jumada I, 963). Celebrating Nauruz recalls the importance of the Sun in the Iranian tradition. The Nauruznama, attributed to the eleventh-century Persian philosopher ʿUmar Khayyam, mentions that God created the Sun, and nurtured the Earth and the sky by it (parwarish dād). People look at the Sun with respect and veneration (jalāl wa taʿẓīm) because it is a light from the lights of God and He favoured the Sun more than anything else. Anyone who respects the Sun also respects God.Footnote ¹⁸

In understanding Akbar's sun project, it is important to measure the degree to which Akbar really introduced something new. As mentioned already, Akbar stood at the end of a long Timurid tradition of cosmological imagination that goes back even further to the days of the Baghdad translation movement, which had already brought together Greek, Indian, and Persian cosmological ideas, much of which culminated in the ideological laboratory of the so-called Ikhwan al-Safa, or Brethren of Purity. The amalgamation process of these ideas conditioned a revival of one particular element of the mixture—Neoplatonism, which provided the most flexible toolset available for ideological assimilation and unification, also deeply affecting the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabi.Footnote ¹⁹ Obviously, Neoplatonism itself changed as a result of this process, undergoing a massive revival under Mongol patronage during the long thirteenth century. Whereas, under the Fatimids, the Brethren had to operate secretly and anonymously, under the Ilkhans, their later Neoplatonists colleagues gained the spotlight as eminent intellectuals. Often under the guise of prediluvian, ancient wisdom, the likes of Baba Afzaladdin Kashani, Nasir al-Din Tusi, Fakhr al-Din ʿIraqi, and Mahmud Shabistari managed to translate and popularise Hermetic and Sufi Neoplatonism into the wider Persianate world.Footnote ²⁰

Hence, the cosmological vision of Timurid rulers such as Iskandar sultan (1384–1415) and Akbar's father, Humayun (1508–56), should be seen in that long Neoplatonic tradition that looked towards the cosmos through emanations and correspondences. In the medieval Islamic world, the structure of Heaven inherited from both Aristotelian and Ptolemaic systems was enriched with elements of Neoplatonic philosophies, which explains why Heaven progressively became the reflection of the terrestrial world. All this was accommodated into Islamic cosmology in which the Sun holds the first rank but remains subordinated to God. The Sun's light emanates from God's own throne. So God placed the Sun at the centre of the universe in order to transmit the influx of the divine spirit (al-rūḥ) to men. From this Neoplatonic perspective, the Sun animates and redistributes the influx because, among the planets, the Sun embodies the astrological active intelligence. Thus, according to the theory of correspondences between the celestial and terrestrial worlds, the Sun patronises kings and symbolises good government and legitimate power.Footnote ²¹

On a more abstract level, Neoplatonists who venerated the Sun also venerated light, which fitted even better with their monist longings to square the existence of a single divine principle with a multiplicity of divine forces spread throughout the world. Here, they still followed the idea of the Neoplatonist Iamblichus, who argued that, because it ultimately emerged from a single source of illumination, divine light remained unified, even as it seemed to be dispersed infinitely throughout the cosmos. In this way, one could defend a metaphysics in which divinity was simultaneously transcendent and yet omnipresent, remotely pure and yet intimately involved with the material world.Footnote ²² Just before the Mongol conquest of Iran, this Neoplatonic theory of light was elaborated upon by the Persian philosopher Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (d. 1191) and his Philosophy of Illumination (Ishraqi). For our present purpose, it is important to point out that he developed a political Science of Lights (ʿilm al-anwār) in which he proposed a new political order to be ruled by an enlightened philosopher king, whose sign of authority was described in terms of a manifest, radiating divine light named farrah-yi īzadī that recalled the divine aura of the ancient kings of Persian mythology.Footnote ²³

Iamblichus's well-known practice of theurgy—that is, evoking the divine through ritual—also remained alive and kicking under Islam and, as mentioned already, experienced an upsurge after the Mongol conquests as part of a much wider renaissance of the occult sciences under the Ilkhanid and Timurid rulers. Part and parcel of this longer-term theurgic legacy were rituals and prayers that attempted to subjugate (taskhīr) celestial spirits, the Sun being one of them, in order to receive worldly power. Within the Islamic world, Astral magic (hīmiyā), ‘the science of harnessing the power of the planets’, gained new momentum due to the spread of grimoires such as Sirr al-Maktum of Fakhr al-Din Razi (1149–1210), which became popular in both the Safavid and Mughal empires.Footnote ²⁴ In the latter case, it developed in intimate dialogue with highly commensurable Indic practices of planetary divination. An important case in point is the eclectic work of the Indian Shattari-Sufi Muhammad Ghauth Gwaliyari (1502–63), all the more so because he was so close to Mughal Emperor Humayun and even attempted to enrol the young Akbar as his disciple.Footnote ²⁵ Clearly, these ideas on sun divination must have been within easy reach of the Mughal court.

From this deeper Neoplatonic perspective, it seems that there was not much that was new under the Sun during Akbar's reign. In a way, Akbar simply continued the cosmotheistic tradition of his ancestors. However, while he continued to favour the idea of cosmological correspondences, he actually came closer to the Neoplatonic–Ishraqi ideal by also propagating the idea of farrah-yi īzadī and by linking that to Sun divination. According to Badaʾuni, Hindus had taught him to mutter spells ‘for the purpose of subduing the sun to his wishes’.Footnote ²⁶ Although Badaʾuni saw Akbar's direct devotion to the Sun as an adoption of ‘pagan’ traditions, he also implicitly suggests that there were also other forces around that pushed Akbar in this direction. Thus, he observed that philosophers and learned persons who were close to Akbar (ḥukamāʾ wa fuẓalā-yi muqarrab) made an argument that the Sun should be seen as the Great Luminous Being (nayyir-i aʿẓam) that benefits the whole world, that the Sun is the patron (murabbi) of the kings, and that the kings are its viceregents (murawwij).Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, the Persian nayyir-i aʿẓam is very much the term repeatedly used by both Abul Fazl and Faizi, going back to the earlier Timurids and further back to Ishraqi philosophy.Footnote ²⁸ This raises the important question: Apart from his Hindu and Zoroastrian advisers, who else was there to have an impact on the emergence of Akbar's sun project?

Millennial wisdom and Akbar the trailblazer

The moment at which Akbar started to conceive that his sun project was an ominous one occurred in November 1577 when a comet was seen in the sky: What would it mean for the fate of the emperors? In Iran, the comet was linked to the death of Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524–76). Although Akbar continued his rule, he became increasingly mesmerised by cosmological calculations that could impact his reign. This was stimulated by the arrival of a group of Iranian immigrants called Nuqtawis. These were members of an originally Hurufi sect that combined witticism and broad-mindedness with a deep knowledge of the occult meaning behind letters, numbers, and other cosmic signs. Increasingly persecuted in Safavid Iran, some of them moved to India, with many of them finding asylum at Akbar's court. The subsequent prominence of the Nuqtawis at the Mughal court in the 1580s is illustrated by the official Safavid chronicle of Iskandar Beg Munshi, who even labels Abul Fazl a Nuqtawi who, with ‘his absurd words made the king a drinker from many sources of truth leading him astray from the right path of the Islamic law’.Footnote ²⁹ Although we should be wary of taking the Iranian munshi's judgement for granted, it does raise the intriguing question of the extent to which Abul Fazl was indeed influenced by Nuqtawi ideas and to what degree the Nuqtawis themselves were behind the millennial craze that suddenly surrounded the Mughal court. One figure who became very influential during those days was the Iranian immigrant, Hakim Abul Fath Gilani, who had close Nuqtawi connections and, after his arrival in 1575, became an intimate adviser to the emperor and very good friends with both Abul Fazl and his brother, Faizi.Footnote ³⁰

In due course, the increasing millennial craze at court led to a very ambitious historical project that involved the writing of two chronicles: a brand-new world history, called the Tarikh-i Alfi, and a history of Akbar, called the Akbar Nama. Quite tellingly, the former was launched in 990 (1582), which was the year in which a king would come to eradicate falsehood, according to the Nuqtawi sage, Sharif Amuli. Using his Hurufi skills, following the lettrist system of Abjad, it was indeed Akbar whose name represented that ominous year, and all this happened just at the moment at which astrologers also announced the occurrence of the so-called qiran—the auspicious conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.Footnote ³¹

The prime investigator of the history project was Abul Fazl, who wrote the second chronicle himself, have coordinated the first one. The millennial world history covers the story of the first Islamic millennium based on a vast range of Arabic and Persian sources, and attempts to understand the reasons behind the rise and fall of kings. Unlike any other Mughal history, the Tarikh-i Alfi includes extensive philosophical discussions, including one on sun worship, to which we will return soon. The authors who were assigned to write the chronicle had diverse intellectual backgrounds.Footnote ³² Apart from Badaʾuni, whom we met previously as Akbar's conservative critic, most of the authors can be associated in one way or another with the long Neoplatonic philosophical tradition, as discussed in the previous paragraph. Indeed, at least three of them can be linked to the Ishraqi or Illuminationist school through the important figure of Shaykh Mubarak Nagori (d. 1592), who happened to be not only Abul Fazl's father, but also the venerated teacher of at least two other authors: Naqib Khan and Badaʾuni. Crucially, though, Shaykh Mubarak himself studied Ishraqi philosophy in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) under Kazeruni, with the latter even adopting him as his son. Later on, in Agra, the Shaykh married into the family of Rafi-al Din Safavi, further strengthening the bond between the Mubarak family and the Ishraqi school. Probably the greatest Ishraqi scholar amongst them was another Iranian immigrant, Shah Fath Allah Shirazi (d. 1587), who was also the mastermind behind the introduction of the solar era.Footnote ³³

The Alfi is the only imperial Mughal history that offers an extensive discussion on sun worship. Earlier at the court, the teenager Akbar had commissioned the Hamza Nama—a heavily illustrated work about the adventures of Hamza, the uncle of the Prophet, in which sun worship is still associated with the villain, the heathen king Malik Iraj.Footnote ³⁴ The Akbar Nama is full of light and illumination metaphors, but references to Akbar's sun worship are few. It does discuss, however, the Egyptian Enoch, also known as Idris and Hermes Trismegistus, as one of the 52 wise men who anticipated the wisdom of Akbar. Indeed, Enoch shows up as an avid sun-worshipper who renewed the law and introduced astronomy, writing, spinning, weaving, and sewing.Footnote ³⁵ Apart from this sole reference in the text, there is only one illustration that unequivocally depicts Akbar standing to worship the Sun after an important military victory.Footnote ³⁶ In Akbar's copy of Rashid al-Din's thirteenth-century world history, we find an illustration from circa 1595 in which Moses seems to lead his people towards the venerated Sun at the moment at which the Egyptian army is drawn into the Red Sea.Footnote ³⁷ Abul Fazl's Akbar Nama, that is the Ain, refers only once to Akbar's sun cult:

The relative silence in the Akbar Nama is intriguing. It suggests that Akbar lost interest in the sun project, or perhaps somehow found it embarrassing, when the Akbar Nama was undergoing its final editing sometime during the last years of the sixteenth century.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, the citation above suggests that there was increasing criticism from conservative jurists, to be countered by reference to the Qurʾan itself. Nevertheless, Akbar's son and successor, Jahangir, appears to have taken up his father's cult again, most conspicuously in his zodiacal coins and his dream paintings showing Jahangir with an enormous Sun and crescent Moon surrounding his head.Footnote ⁴⁰ It seems that it was only under Shah Jahan that sun worship as such was no longer acceptable, even for the more lenient Sufi Muslims.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, sun symbolism and taskhīr continued to be important until and even after the end of the Mughal empire.

Coming back to the Alfi, it too gives only a few examples of rulers who venerated the Sun. The only Mongol ruler that is mentioned is Qaidu (circa 1230–1301), the grandson of the Mongol khagan Ögedei, who is described as the one who knelt three times before the Sun (nayyir-i aʿẓam).Footnote ⁴² Interestingly, both the Alfi and Rashid al-Din fail to reproduce the story in the Mongol Secret History in which Chinggis Khan climbs mount Burqan Qaldun to worship the Sun.Footnote ⁴³ More important than individual cases, though, the Alfi provides a lengthy philosophical elaboration of sun worship and discusses the topic in connection with the transmigration of the soul (tanāsukh). The Alfi first explains the reasons behind tanāsukh and its necessity for the soul's perfection. It combines various arguments from Greek, Indic, Persian, Islamic, and Ishraqi perspectives on the broad acceptance of tanāsukh. It then connects Indic to Greek philosophy and concludes that believers of tanāsukh in India also venerated the Sun. Hence, the discussion of sun worship does not deal with Akbar's own ideas and practices that had started at that time, but instead offers a historical overview of previous cults as based on the following five sources:

1. 1. The Maqsad-i Aqsa (Far Destination), written by the thirteenth-century Sufi author, ʿAziz al-Din b. Muhammad al-Nasafi, who is well known for his work on the Perfect Man (insān-i kāmil) as derived from the theories of Ibn ʿArabi.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Maqsad is a philosophical work that mostly speaks about the relationships of human beings with God, self-consciousness, and the purification of the soul. His sympathies lie with the so-called ahl-i waḥdat, who represent the ontological position that all existence is single and that this is the existence of God.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Maqsad offers a long discussion about the concept of light and connects Islamic, Greek, and Indic views.Footnote ⁴⁶

2. 2. The Akhbar al-Umam (Stories Concerning Communities), attributed to the ninth-century astrologer Mashallah Misri.Footnote ⁴⁷ His actual name was Mashallah b. Athari and he was a Jewish astrologer who lived in the early Abbasid period. His known list of books does not mention Akhbar al-Umam. Possibly the Alfi refers to Al-Duwal wa al-Milal (The Governments and Systems of Thoughts) or maybe this book was known as Akhbar al-Umam by the Mughal historians.

3. 3. The Milal wa al-Nihal (The Book of Sects and Systems of Thoughts), written by the famous twelfth-century scholar Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Karim al-Shahristani. It offers a detailed description of Indic religious traditions, including sun worship, based on various sources.

4. 4. The Taskhir al-Kawakib (Possession of Stars), attributed to the famous ninth-century astrologer Abu Maʿshar al-Balkhi (d. 866). It is another title that we could not link to the known lists of works by this author.Footnote ⁴⁸ In any case, it has valuable information about sun rituals.

5. 5. The Tasbihat al-Kawakib (Prayers to the Stars), written by the twelfth-century author Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (d. 1191). As mentioned already, Suhrawardi is known for his Philosophy of Illumination. Although this source is mentioned in the Alfi's list, there seem to be no direct citations coming from this work, which may indicate more general inspiration.

The list once again demonstrates how Akbar could draw inspiration from an existing tradition of Arabic and Persianised Neoplatonic texts. The Tarikh-i Alfi sets the discussion about sun worship in the narrative related to the death of the third caliph, ʿUthman b. ʿAffan (r. 644–55). After explaining the caliph's tragic death, it suddenly refers to the Maqsad-i Aqsa to open the discussion about sun worship. According to the Maqsad, the caliph ʿUthman sent his forces to Yemen to destroy qaṣar ghumdān—a temple built by sixth-century Himyarite King Sayf b. Dhi Yazan.Footnote ⁴⁹ The temple had 180 windows for observing the sunlight and pilgrims visited the place to make a circumambulation (ṭawāf mīkardand).Footnote ⁵⁰ The Alfi provides further details about the temple from the Akhbar al-Umam. It mentions that this temple was called haykal al-shams (the sun temple). It was built by Sayf because he followed some prophets (anbiyāʾ) who prayed towards the Sun (qibla-yi ʿibādat-i īshān). Every day, Sayf stood in front of a window, prostrated (sajda) before the Sun, reciting the following appraisal (tasbīḥ):Footnote ⁵¹

In true Neoplatonic mode, the text suggests that one should first develop a state of world-renouncing self-awareness before being able to give praise, to receive, and to share in, the divine light that, via the Sun, originates from the first light (nūr al-awwal).

In a further elaboration on non-Islamic sun worship, the Alfi connects it to old Indic practice. Building upon Shahristani, it not only provides accounts of Indians’ praying to the Sun, but also observes that both Aristotle and Suhrawardi knew about such prayers.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Greek connection receives further detail when the text refers to Qalanus (Flavius)—a pupil of Pythagoras, who brought wisdom (ḥikmat) to India.Footnote ⁵⁵ Apart from Qalanus, there is his student Barjamis, who learned Pythagorean philosophy and spread it further among his Indian fellows. Remarkably, it was thanks to these Pythagorean teachings that Indians started to believe that God is pure light (nūr-i maḥż) but appeared in human form and that only those who are worthy and have merit (ahliyyat wa istiḥqāq) can really see Him. They also believed that human beings are enslaved by worldly temptations. Mortals cannot liberate themselves unless they fight these temptations consisting of pleasures, ego, greed, and immorality.Footnote ⁵⁶

Continuing the Hellenic narrative of Shahristani, the Alfi refers to how Alexander met the followers of this idea during his Indian campaign. He killed some of them but regretted it as soon as he saw that their dead bodies were so pure and clean (liṭāfat wa ṣafā) that they looked like fish coming out of the water. Interestingly, after reiterating that these people worshipped the Sun, the Alfi offers a Persian translation of the same Arabic prayer as mentioned earlier but uses terminology of its own. For example, when the Arabic text is saying ‘we try and leave all worldly pleasures to become like you, join your world and reach your place’, the Persian translation renders it as ‘we should not try to leave the worldly pleasures unless our essences (ẕawāt; sing., ẕāt) find the capacity (istiʿdād) to receive your emanations (fayaḍān; sing. fayḍ)’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The translation suggests the imposition of a Neoplatonic metaphysical idiom on an already-existing solar cult, either at the time of the conception of the Alfi or earlier.Footnote ⁵⁸ What is definitively relevant for this point of time is the fact that its Neoplatonist authors hammered home the point that the Hindu ideas of sun worship, which, according to Badaʾuni, may have influenced Akbar, were not Hindu at all, but actually derived from the Greeks and, as such, were an integral part of ancient wisdom going back to the Egyptians.Footnote ⁵⁹

After this story, the Alfi continues to discuss ritual. On the authority of al-Balkhi, it mentions that the worshipper should wear royal dress, such as cloths embroidered with gold, to stand before the Sun in the morning. He should use a golden burner to burn incense made of saffron (zaʿfarān), pomegranate flower (gulnār), gum of quince (mīʿa), frankincense (lubān), lac (lak), sandalwood (ʿūd), and berry (mawīzaj). All these materials should be ground up and mixed with cow's milk. Then, they should be burnt on tamarisk's coal (angisht-i ṭarfā) placed in the golden incense burner.Footnote ⁶⁰ While the incense is burning, he should recite the following appraisal to the Sun:

The final sentence here is quite crucial and once again makes the point that, although the Sun deserves to be worshipped, it derives its divinity from an even higher source. After giving the Persian translation—very much in the same manner as that of the previous prayer—the Alfi ends the discussion here and moves on to the discussion about soul transmigration.

Although the Alfi does not directly refer to Akbar's sun project, it does implicitly relate to it by studying its historical antecedents, thereby giving it both further theoretical clarification as well as legitimation. Indeed, the perennial Neoplatonic frame distances the project from any contemporary Hindu associations and thus, quite conveniently, also from the Islamic criticism expressed against it by the likes of Badaʾuni.

The one and only contemporary source that deals specifically with Akbar's sun worship is the so-called Kitab-i Rubaʿiyat (called Zarra, referring to sun dust or a mote in a sunbeam) by Akbar's court poet, Faizi.Footnote ⁶⁵ We must read it as a poetic companion to the Alfi's historical approach, coming from an author who was close to the core of the group that also authored the Alfi. Indeed, very much like his famous brother, Abul Fazl, Faizi was raised by his father, Shaykh Mubarak Nagori, in a wide array of fields, including traditional theology, philosophy, astronomy, music, and medicine. Like his brother, Faizi had been a major force behind the 1579 Mahzar and the revolutionary ideological developments at Akbar's court that followed. As such he was very much part of that same circle of avant-garde Neoplatonic thinkers who, partly through their involvement in Akbar's history and translation projects, were able to co-design Akbar's new ideology of ṣulḥ-i kull, or Peace for All.Footnote ⁶⁶

Probably composed in the late 1580s or early 1590s, Faizi's Rubaʿiyat offers 393 quatrains that quite systematically discuss Akbar's sun project. In between a description of the Sun's blessed rise and its sinister setting, we find a variety of appraisals of the Sun, its wisdom, its devotion, and its devotees. The whole piece ends with an appraisal of the emperor and a note on the book itself. Interestingly, the preface promises the reader 1,001 poems about the Sun, which probably alludes to the 1,000 Sanskrit names for the Sun that Akbar had supposedly learned from Bhanucandra (see above), but could also refer to the so-called Hazar Shuʿaʿ, (Thousand Rays) mentioned by Badaʾuni—a work of 1,000 short poems (qiṭʿa) on the veneration of the Sun, written by one Mulla Shiri and offered to Akbar in 1583.Footnote ⁶⁷

Although clearly building on earlier Neoplatonic philosophies of light, Faizi's work on sun worship seems fairly unique in the Persian literary tradition. The work starts with the Allahu Akbar formula, which, from 1584, spread as an alternative to the traditional Islamic basmala. It expressed the Neoplatonic idea that, following Faizi's own words, God is unattainably hidden in eternity, beyond all Being, that His light is too high for viewing. But, as Allah is unseeable, the Sun and, lower down the hierarchy, Akbar himself provide an intermediate window to Him. Building on the Neoplatonist ideas of Suhrawardi and others, Faizi makes it very clear that sun worship is not worshipping the Sun as God, but worshipping God through the Sun. Hence, Allahu Akbar should be read not as Akbar is God (as is often assumed), but as God through Akbar. Indeed, it was Akbar's firm cosmotheistic belief in natural universality through the Sun that utterly demolished the boundaries of untranslatability erected by monotheism through revelation.Footnote ⁶⁸

For Faizi, the Sun is represented as mirroring God's beauty and God's light.Footnote ⁶⁹ Even more so than the Sun, it is the light that should determine the direction of our prayers as a new Kaʿba.Footnote ⁷⁰ What is more, for Faizi the Sun is the first emanation (fayḍ), becoming the reason (ʿaql) that generates all that is on Earth: the eye, the heart, the body, and the spirit; fire, air, water, and earth; its tiniest part is a mote in a sunbeam that shares in the Sun's emanation. Devotion means opening up for this emanation, in particular during sunrise and what can be considered the year's sunrise: Nauruz. The role of the king was that of the one and only trailblazer (rāhnumūn) to God: there is just one Sun, one God, one king; indeed, knowing Akbar is knowing God (Akbar bishinās tā khudā bishināsī).Footnote ⁷¹ Upon reading the text, one can share in Faizi's thrill when he detected the identical numeric abjad value of āftāb (the Sun) and Akbar.Footnote ⁷² Clearly, what is suggested in all these poems is that, since Akbar was directly linked to God via the Sun, he could claim an autonomous and universal position above all other prophets, conveniently leaving open the issue of whether that latter category would also include the Prophet. Quite tellingly, in a pun directed towards those Islamic rulers who call themselves ‘the shadow of god’, Abul Fazl makes it clear that Akbar is quite different:

For the likes of Badaʾuni, though, it must have been just one more affront by a ruler who clearly had become an apostate. This immediately brings to mind that other apostate emperor who introduced a Neoplatonic sun project, albeit 12 centuries earlier.

Julian the Apostate

Akbar's ideological message as emperor of the Mughal empire bears some remarkable similarities with that of Julian as emperor of the Roman empire (361–63), who had reigned more than a millennium earlier.Footnote ⁷⁴ Far from being strange, the parallels derive from a common Neoplatonic philosophy applied to similar political conditions. Interestingly, both Akbar and Julian are considered somewhat exceptional rulers who are mostly studied sui generis, as apostates against the then dominant religious tradition of Islam and Christianity, respectively. As we have seen in the case of Akbar's political ideology, and his sun project in particular, these were built on a long legacy of Neoplatonic thinking within the Islamic world. Hence, this links Akbar almost automatically to Julian: the most famous of Neoplatonic rulers who was primarily inspired by the ideas and practices of the philosophers Iamblichus (circa 250–circa 330) and his personal guru Maximus of Ephesus (circa 310–circa 373). Referring to the common political circumstances of their reign, both were trying to rule a vast, extremely diverse empire by concocting a universal philosophical reinterpretation of existing religious traditions through Neoplatonic wisdom in which all the gods share in the divine. Despite these similarities, we should keep in mind that, for Julian, Christianity was a recently adopted imperial religion that had yet to be fully established in the empire whereas, for Akbar, Islam was the tradition that had 1,000 years of momentum and prestige behind it. As a result, the charge of apostasy against Akbar had a much sharper sting than that against Julian. Besides, Julian and Akbar had quite different personalities: the first was highly educated and intellectually inclined, whereas the latter could barely read and write. Nevertheless, both Julian and Akbar had a deep personal interest in mysticism and ritual, and, as such, they could both build upon a well-established Neoplatonic tradition.

Elaborating on the not-so-strange Neoplatonic parallels between Akbar and Julian, we can perceive a common philosophical curiosity and an enormous keenness to engage in religious debate. Both saw themselves as reincarnations of Alexander the Great—as philosopher kings who mediated between the spiritual and material worlds. Like Akbar through his Mahzar, Julian was pontifex maximus—that is, standing above the religious establishment of jurists and priests. As in the case of Akbar's farr, Julian had recognised in himself a hidden spark of divination, which, in his case, had shown him the beauty of philosophy. Hence, Julian as philosopher could use certain theurgic rites to achieve enlightenment, elevation of the soul, and a mystical union with the One, also the Good. As king, though, he knew that he should use his new wisdom altruistically for those below, very much like the wise man in Plato's Timaeus who desired to do good after his vision of the Good in the form of the Demiurge.Footnote ⁷⁵ Through myths, Julian presented himself as a descendant of Zeus-Helios who had received ‘the hidden spark’, very much like the mythical founder of the dynasty, Claudius Gothicus, himself a devotee of the sun god Helios. The myth revealed Julian's true nature as a divinely generated philosopher entrusted with the mandate to lead the oikumenē back to its divine creator.Footnote ⁷⁶ So much for some of the most eye-catching Neoplatonic parallels between Akbar and Julian. But what about these similarities if we zoom in further on the peculiarities of Julian's sun project? To do so, we will primarily follow Susanna Elm's recent analysis of the creative way in which Julian reinterpreted two already-existing religiously festivals: those of the mother goddess Cybele and the sun god Helios.Footnote ⁷⁷

At the spring equinox of 362, Julian reinvigorated the old cult of the Mother of the Gods by writing the Hymn to the Mother of the Gods. This was a deeply philosophical reinterpretation in which the Mother of the Gods had fallen in love with the shepherd Attis. When Attis fell in love with a nymph, the Mother of the Gods retaliated by having him castrate himself. When Attis passed away, she resurrected him and thus allowed him to return to the divine realm. Hence, Attis came to serve as a mediator between the divine and the material realms. According to Julian, the act of creating material forms, including the stars and the galaxy, belonged to the visible sun god Helios. For Julian, Attis represented the active rays of Helios descending towards that galaxy from the One, alias the Mother of the Gods, when falling in love with the nymph. His castration marked both the lowest point of his descent and the point of his ascent back to Her, all the while remaining divine.

Julian's cosmology followed Iamblichus: the man whom he considered to be superior to all those of his time, the third after Pythagoras and Plato. The ‘divine’ philosopher himself hailed from a very influential Syrian family—the Sampsigeramids of Emesa, who, one century earlier, had gained access to the imperial throne with Elagabalus (r. 218–22), who had earlier introduced the sun cult of his Syrian home to Rome. As a true assimilator, Iamblichus had brought Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras under one Platonic umbrella that accommodated not only Hellenic gods such as Orpheus and Zeus, but also the Egyptian and Chaldaic traditions as represented in the Hermetic books and the Chaldaean Oracles, respectively. The latter became a kind of Neoplatonic New Testament that supported the shift of Neoplatonism towards the religion and theology that proved crucial for the later development of its thinking in both the Latin West and the Islamic East.Footnote ⁷⁸

One of Iamblichus's most important theological contributions was that he lessened the ontological divide between the spiritual and the material worlds by dividing the divine Intellect (Nous) itself into three parts: the highest part of the Intellect was identical to the One, the middle part was the same as Helios or the Sun, and the lowest part of the Intellect was identical to the visible Sun: representing Helios's presence in the material world.Footnote ⁷⁹ All mankind is born from Helios and is nourished by Helios. He frees man's soul from the body and guides it towards the divine. Attis represented the creative force of Helios—‘the essence of the generative and creative Intellect’ who ‘through his excessive fecundity descends from the highest spheres past the stars down to the earth’.Footnote ⁸⁰ All in all, we can say that, with his Hymn to the Mother of the Gods, Julian offered a new Neoplatonic myth about the generation of this material world of ours and of mankind itself.Footnote ⁸¹

Nine months later, at around the time of the winter solstice, Julian decided to revive another old festival; this time, it was one in which he could elaborate on his own special relationship with his spiritual father, Zeus-Helios. In his Hymn to King Helios, Julian reiterates that Helios is the mediator—the Mean, the Nexus, ‘the Middle of the Middle’—between transcendent and visible realities. Emanating from the One, Helios is the Demiurge of the universe and the father of all men. In analogy with this triadic model, Julian presented a downward extension of (1) the king of all at the centre of kosmos noetos to (2) king Helios at the centre of kosmos noeros to (3) the visible Sun in the kosmos aisthetos to the emperor surrounded by his officials.Footnote ⁸² Basically, all this followed Plato's Republic (508b) in which the Sun is ‘the offspring of the Good, which the Good generated in analogy to itself, so that what the Good is in the Intelligible World in relation to the Intellect and the objects it conceives, the sun is in the Visible/Material World in relation to sight and what is seen’. So, just as the One contains in itself abstract and transcendental thought but also produces the whole beautiful cosmos in eternity and perpetuity, so the visible Sun unites the visible and sensible worlds.Footnote ⁸³ By creatively using Plato and Iamblichus, Julian was able to construct a universal political theory of kingship in which the prime Roman imperial traditions, including that of the Sol Invictus of his pagan predecessors, were also seen as Greek in origin and constitution, and as such were incorporated under the umbrella of Helios, who was the origin and destination of all creation. As brilliantly formulated by Elm: ‘the sun, eternal, victorious, invincible, guaranteed the security of the res publica; endowed with providence, it was beneficent, bestowing felicitous times on all, illuminating everything with its light and wisdom, and uniting all into one.’Footnote ⁸⁴

Despite the specific temporal and spatial coordinates of Julian's Roman sun project, we can clearly perceive the overall Neoplatonic similarities with the Mughal one under Akbar. Crucial in all this is the layered cosmology behind the worship of the Sun and its light as a pathway, via the worlds of the Intellect and/or the Soul ascending to the One. In both cases, there is the enlightened emperor as the earthly mediator to bring happiness to humanity as a whole. To use again the words of Elm about Julian:

Also typical for both cases is that there may have been other sources of inspiration, but these were conveniently incorporated as part of an ancient wisdom that, through the capable hands of various generations of Neoplatonist intellectuals, could even be traced to as far back as antediluvian times of pharaonic kingship and the great magus Hermes Trismegistus.Footnote ⁸⁶

Perhaps more so than Akbar, and in contradiction with his Neoplatonist masters, Julian, with his solar enthusiasm, makes the sun god Helios the central divinity. This is exemplified in Julian's final prayer to the Mother of the Gods in which he asks Helios to give guidance and good fortune to his people, his empire, and himself:

Even in this prayer in which Helios indeed seems to be centre stage, it is clear that happiness for all comes ultimately through the guidance of Helios, from the knowledge of the gods. Julian's prayer is another illustration of the religious turn that Neoplatonism had taken under the influence of Iamblichus. We should not forget, though, that, even for the more sober Plotinus, a form of contemplative praying to the Sun was advisable. For him, too, the Sun was the visible manifestation of spiritual reality as well as the deepest self of the one who prays. It was a longing for union with the divine: a combination of aesthetic perception, reverential feeling, visualisation, and inwardisation of attention.Footnote ⁸⁸ As for the divine, in The Enneads, Plotinus writes:

Plotinus makes the striking statement that the Sun is the image of the One: it is the One's own image, manifesting something of its power: goodness and unity, thus making it a fit object for reverential contemplation. Indeed, like Akbar and Julian, Plotinus refers to the visible Sun as God, or rather the visual, natural statue (agalma) of God: it has a divine soul, a divine Intellect, and is itself ever in contemplation of the One.Footnote ⁹⁰ In another passage of The Enneads, Plotinus asks us to imagine a soul pouring life and light into the cosmos in the same way as the Sun illumes and tinges with gold a dark cloud. In the words of Michael Wakoff: ‘Plotinus asks us to visualize a cosmic sunrise, a contemplation of dawn, indeed, the cosmic dawn, when the universe is born, the archetype of all our terrestrial dawns.’Footnote ⁹¹

If Julian's sun worship was already a typically Hellenistic amalgamation of a wide variety of ideas, then it was one century later that another Neoplatonist, Proclus (412–85), offered a similarly assimilative view on the topic with echoes of Plato, Plotinus, the Chaldaean Oracles, and particularly Iamblichus—and now also Julian. Very much like Faizi in the context of his Islamic milieu, Proclus had to defend the superiority of the Hellenic traditions of wisdom in a society dominated by Christianity. In order to do so, Proclus continued Iamblichus's and Julian's systematisations of the ancient religious revelations with the philosophical tradition of Pythagoras and Plato. It was Proclus who played a crucial role in the transmission of Neoplatonic philosophy from antiquity to both the Christian Middle Ages and the Islamic world.Footnote ⁹² In the latter case, this is particularly shown in the way in which Proclus and the later Neoplatonists in the Islamic world after him agree on the cosmic centrality of the Sun. They would all agree that it is the light of the Sun that creates order and harmony in the universe, and, at the same time, elevates all things back to their origin: the Demiurgic Nous or Intellect.Footnote ⁹³ Both Julian and Akbar could only but have wholeheartedly agreed!