There is no denying the fact that Ziyauddin had his prejudices, his weaknesses and his handicaps.... But after all these decuctions have been made, the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi remains the greatest book that has survived to us from the Sultanate period. Its eminence in this respect is unchallengable; and so long as the history of India is studied, Barani cannot be ignored...
Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)
Ziyauddi Barani (1285 – 1357) was a Muslim political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate located in present-day Northern India during Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah's reign. He was best known for composing the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi (also called Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi), a work on medieval India, which covers the period from the reign of Ghiyas ud din Balban to the first six years of reign of Firoz Shah Tughluq and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari which promoted a hierarchy among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent
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Alternative Names:
Ziya' al-Din Barani
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It is the duty of a king to enforce, if he can, those royal laws which have become proverbial owing to their principles of justice and mercy. But if owing to change of time and circumstances he is unable to enforce the laws of the ancients (i.e. ancient Muslim rulers), he should, with the counsel of wise men… frame laws suited to his time and circumstances and proceed to enforce them. Much reflection is necessary in order that laws, suited to his reign, are properly framed.
After the promulgation of these interdicts, the Sultan requested the wise men to supply some rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion. There was to be one rule for the payment of tribute applicable to all, from the khuta to the baldhar and the heaviest tribute was not to fall upon the poorest. The Hindu was to be so reduced as to be left unable to keep a horse to ride on, to carry arms, to wear fine clothes, or to enjoy any of the luxuries of life... the people were brought to such a state of obedience that one revenue officer would string twenty khats, mukaddims, or chaudharis together by the neck, and enforce payment by blows. No Hindu could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver, tonkas or jitals, or of any superfluity was to be seen. These things, which nourish insubordination and rebellion, were no longer to be found. Driven by destitution, the wives of the khals and mukaddims went and served for hire in the houses of the Musulmans. Sharaf Ki, naibh-wazir, so rigorously enforced his demands and exactions against the collectors and other revenue officers, and such investigations were made, that every single jital against their names was ascertained from the books of the patwdris (village accountants). Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.
The Muslim king will not be able to establish the honour of theism (tauhid) and the supremacy of the Islam unless he strives with all his courage to overthrow infidelity and to slaughter its leaders (imams), who in India are the Brahmans. He should make a firm resolve to overpower, capture, enslave an degrade the infidels. All the strength and power of the king and of the holy warriors of Islam should be concentrated in holy campaigns and holy wars; and they should risk themselves in the enterprise so that the true Faith may uproot the false creeds, and then it will look as if these false creeds had never existed because they have been deprived of all their glamour. On the other hand, if the Muslim king, in spite of the power and position which God has given him, is merely content to take the poll-tax (jizya) and tribute (kharaj) from the Hindus and preserves both infidels and infidelity and refuses to risk his power in attempting to overthrow them, what differences will there be in this respect between the kings of Islam and the Rais of the infidels? For the Rais of the infidels also exact the poll-tax (jizya) and the tribute (kharaj) from the Hindus, who belong to their own false creed, and fill their treasuries with money so obtained; in fact, they collect a hundred times more taxes.
The majority of religious scholars and wise men of early (Islamic) as well as later time have been sure that if Muslim kings strive with all their might and power and the power of all their supporters on this path, the following objects will be attained:-the true Faith will gain a proper ascendancy over the false creeds; the True Word will be honoured; the traditions of infidelity and polytheism will be weakened; Musalmans will be favoured and honoured; infidels and men of bad faith will be faced with destitution and disgrace; the orders of the unlawful state and the opposed creeds will be erased; the laws of the shari'at will be enforced on the seventy-two communities; and the enemies of God and the Prophet will be condemned, banished, repudiated and terrorised.
The Indian Muslim nobles, who were local converts, also rose to be officers in the upper cadres, but foreigners were always preferred. The fourteenth century Persian chronicler Ziyauddin Barani, who was born in India but traced his ancestry to a Turki Noble, credits the foreigner Turks with all possible virtues and the Indian Muslims with all kinds of imperfections. The invectives he hurls on the converted Sultan Nasiruddin Khusrau Shah (C.E. 1320), are too well known to need repetition.
If the kings of Islam, with all their majesty and power, take for granted infidelity and infidels, polytheism and polytheists throughout their domin- ions in return for the land revenue (kharaj) and jizya, how will the tradition, “If I fight people until they say, ‘There is no god but God,’ and if they say, ‘There is no god but God,’ they are immune from me and their persons and property exist only by virtue of Islam,” be observed? And how will infidelity and infidels, polytheism and polytheists be overthrown—the purpose of the mission of 124,000 prophets and the domination of sultans of Islam since Islam appeared? If the kings of Islam do not strive with all their might for this overthrow, if they do not devote all their courage and energies to this end for the satisfaction of God and of the prophet, for the assistance of the Faith and the exalting of the True Word; if they become content with extracting the jizya and the land tax from the Hindus who worship idols and cow-dung, taking for granted the Hindu way of life with all its stipulations of infidelity, how shall infidelity be brought to an end, now that Muhammad’s Prophethood has come to an end—and it was by the prayers of the prophets that infidelity was being ended? How will “Truth be established at the Center” and how will the Word of God obtain the opportunity for supremacy? How will the True Faith prevail over other religions, if the kings of Islam, with the power and prestige of Islam that has appeared in the world, with three hundred years of hereditary faith in Islam, permit the banners of infidelity to be openly displayed in their capital and in the cities of the Muslims, idols to be openly worshiped and the conditions of infidelity to be observed as far as possible, the mandates of their false creed to operate without fear? How will the True Faith prevail if rulers allow the infidels to keep their temples, adorn their idols, and to make merry during their festivals with beating of drums and dhols [a kind of drum], singing and dancing?
At the beginning of the third year of the reign, Ulugh Khan and Nusrat Khan, with their amirs and generals, and a large army marched against Gujarat… All Gujarat became a prey to the invaders, and the idol, which after the victory of Sultan Mahmud and his destruction of (the idol) of Manat, the Brahmans had set up under the name of Somanat, for the worship of the Hindus, was carried to Delhi where it was laid for the people to tread upon…
Sons of Mahmud' and kings of Islam! You should with all your royal determination apply yourself to uprooting and disgracing infidels, polytheists, and men of bad dogmas and bad religions, if you wish that you may not have to be ashamed before God and his Prophets and that in your record of life-concerning what you have said and done, the clothes you have worn, and the food you have eatenthey may write good instead of evil. You should consider the enemies of God and His Faith to be your enemies and you should risk your power and authority in overthrowing them, so that you may win the approval of God and the Prophet Mohammad and of all prophets and saints. You should not content yourself merely with levying the poll-tax and the tribute from the infidels and you should not allow infidelity to be preserved in spite of your royal power and authority. You should strive day and night for the degradation of infidelity so that (on the Day of Judgment) you may be raised (from your graves) among the prophets and be blessed with the sight of God for all eternity and "may find a seat among the truthful near the Powerful King of (God)."
Ziauddin Barani [Diyā al-Dīn Baranī: 1285-1357] who was an Indian jurist, historian, political thinker, writer, and a companion of Sultan Muhammad b. Tughluq [1309 –1388], wrote a Fürstenspiegel, a Mirror of Princes, akin to Machiavelli’s The Prince, the Fatāwā-yi Djahāndārī, in order to educate the de facto rulers of the day, the sultans, in their duty towards Islam in an age of corruption. Barani advises sultans to enforce the sharī‘a, to curb unorthodoxy ( especially speculative philosophy, falsafa), to degrade the infidel, who must be treated harshly. The Sultans must fight like the Prophet until all people affirm that “there is no God but Allah.” It is the duty of Muslim rulers to overthrow infidelity, uproot it completely, and apply the Holy Law, the Sharia on all.
As late as the fourteenth century Ziyauddin Barani wrote that “if they (the Hindus) do not find a mighty sovereign at their head, nor behold crowds of horse and foot with drawn swords and arrows threatening their lives and property, they fail in their allegiance, refuse payment of revenue, and excite a hundred tumults and revolts’’.
Ziyauddin Barani voiced his opinion against the Hanafi school when he wrote as follows in his Fatwa-i-Jahandari: “If Mahmud… had gone to India once more, he would have brought under his sword all the Brahmans of Hind who, in that vast land, are the cause of the continuance of the laws of infidelity and of the strength of idolators; he would have cut off the heads of two or three hundred thousand Hindu chiefs. He would not have returned his Hindu-slaughtering sword to its scabbard until the whole of Hind had accepted Islam. For Mahmud was a Shafiite, and according to Imam Shafii the decree for Hindus is Islam or death, that is to say, they should either be put to death or accept Islam. It is not lawful to accept jiziya from Hindus who have neither a prophet nor a revealed book.”
Teachers of every kind are to be sternly ordered not to thrust precious stones down the throats of dogs… that is, to the mean, the ignoble, the worthless. To shopkeepers and the low born they are to teach nothing more than the rules about prayer, fasting, religious charity and the Hajj pilgrimage along with some chapters of the Quran and some doctrines of the faith without which their religion cannot be correct and valid prayers are not possible. They are to be instructed in nothing more. They are not to be taught reading and writing for plenty of disorders arise owing to the skill of the low-born in knowledge… The disorders into which the affairs of the state are thrown are due to the acts and wards of the low-born, who have become skilled. (Advice XI)