In the Mughal history of Akbar’s Lahore, there is nothing more mysterious than the missing masterpiece on the history of the first 1,000 years of Islam and its personalities.

This masterpiece was ordered by the Mughal emperor Akbar and took 10 years to complete in which 10 of the finest scholars of that era contributed. Known as ‘Tarikh-i-Alfi’, or the ‘Millennial History’, it had many detractors, and for some unknown mysterious reason its text was never made public. It was initially in eight volumes, and a condensed version was printed in Iran five years ago, but the publisher was jailed, and the book banned.

Written in the Persian language, which remained the court language even till the first few years of British rule, it is considered the sole official Mughal research effort. Conservative scholars even then considered it an attempt to try to portray Akbar as the ‘Mehdi’ that the Quran teaches us, “a messianic deliverer who will fill the earth with justice, equity and restore true religion just before the end of the world”.

The book even at one stage has Akbar being portrayed as the Sun, or Surya, the basic founding idol of the Hindu religion. The book is illustrated on every page with beautiful calligraphic images of the earth being shaken by earthquakes, of huge ice pieces falling from the skies, and shows beautiful buildings and well-dressed people of fine-looking animals all being crushed by the weather in all its shades.

These are all leading to what was collectively known as ‘Tarikh-i-Alfi’ (a history of a 1,000 years) which was completed in 1592 AD in Lahore and was part of Lahore’s Mughal Toshakhana. The team of writers and scholars collected belonged to Lahore and to Iran, and their writing were illustrated by artists collected from all over India and Iran and housed in Lahore.

This effort by Akbar did not contain any biography of the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) but contains the assumption that the completion of 1,000 years of Islam was in essence the beginning of a new cycle of time, and that the world was at an end and that Akbar had been sent to guide the world as a ‘saint-king’.

Amazingly, this belief was widespread in those days as Islam spread all over the world. The belief that 1,000 years of Islam was a ‘time cycle’ before the end was taken up by other rulers like the Shah of Golconda, Muhammad Quli Qutb, as also by the Safavid ruler, Shah Ismail the First. So, unlike other rulers, Akbar attempted while in Lahore to prove that he was the true messianic deliverer.

The ‘Tarikh-i-Alfi’ is certainly a contrived attempt to produce a theory of Akbar as a just and pluralistic king. If we study at how Akbar treated Punjabis while he was in Lahore for 14 years, we see him skinning alive Dullah Bhatti, the peasant leader of Pindi Bhattian, striving for a fairer agriculture tax, and hanging him from the main gate of the Lahore Fort. He did the same with Dullah Bhatti’s father, as with others protesting the massive taxes imposed on poor farmers.

The entire book, at every stage, proposes that all power must be concentrated in the hands of a single enlightened ruler, and that the clergy had no right to interpret this message. The clergy of Lahore, as also did a few others, interpreted this attempt as trying to invent a new religion which they called ‘Deen-i-Elahi’, which they interpreted as trying to reduce (not demolish) the influence of the Holy Quran.

According to one interpretation, the book describes a series of events from third Islamic century when the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil persecuted Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians. Amazingly in those days North Africa faced deadly hailstorms, and Syria was hit by earthquakes that sent tremors as far as Iraq and destroyed multiple cities. These disasters, the Tarikh suggests, “were a consequence of the Caliph’s religious intolerance, for such bigotry was a violation of the sacred duties of Islamic kingship”.

Just why did the ‘Tarikh-i-Alfi’ interpret world events in such a context. In those days Akbar had defeated a rebellion of his Central Asian lords, mostly Sunni Muslims. Around the same time, the Safavid dynasty of Iran had persecuted unorthodox Shia sects, and many of these Shia scholars and administrators had joined Akbar. Added to this we see that Akbar, for purely political reasons, had married several Hindu Rajput princesses and their family were recruited to the Mughal Army.

This marrying of Hindu royalty was resisted by Sunni clergy, and they declared him a ‘kafir’. To overcome this resistance, many scholars interpret, there was a need to develop an alternate discourse. This reason, as one Cambridge University scholar working on this project, thinks that this “one among a series of projects undertaken by Akbar was to establish himself as the culmination of a thousand years of history: the ‘ideal’ man and king.”

The book contains images of people fleeing as icy hail falls from the skies; a nobleman supervises the construction of a palace, only for it to be shaken to pieces by a disastrous earthquake. Animals, trees and people are crushed by collapsing architecture. Both this vision of disaster and the calligraphy that it contains are part of a complex series of events and arguments collected.

The Tarikh is by no means a comprehensive history, or even — strictly speaking — a history in the modern sense. It instead develops a theory of just and pluralistic kingship. It argues for the concentration of authority in the hands of a single enlightened ruler, reducing the power of the clergy, and providing a historical justification for Akbar’s pluralistic policies.

Scholars suggest that this is the earliest formulation of “imperial Hindustan” as a single identity stretching from the Himalayas through the Deccan into the deep South. Amazingly this is the image that the current Indian ruler is trying to portray for a ‘united Bharat’.

Interestingly, the ancient ruler of Lahore was named Bharata. Lahore is where Akbar commissioned and completed this mysterious ‘Tarikh-i-Alfi’. It was here that it was kept, and disappeared for centuries.

The question is just why was this massive project started and completed in Lahore, simply lie dormant in Lahore’s Toshakhana? The answer lies that the clergy by declaring this as an attempt to enforce a ‘Deen-i-Elahi’ had managed to find considerable support from the population at large, not only in Lahore but all over the sub-continent.

Added to this the Mughals after him, especially Aurangzeb, ordered that all books of the ‘Tarikh-i-Alfi’ be destroyed. This was a universal response. Today it seems this massive undertaking is considered as a ‘waste of time’ trying to promote a name forever. But then crazy communal leaders and rulers all, in a way do like to be praised as ‘unbeatable’. One need not go far to find such examples.

In Cambridge the Kings’ College fellow, Dr. Said Reza Huseini, an Afghan from Mazaar-i-Sharif, is working on this project, and recently gave a well-attended talk here. Other researchers are working on the history of Lahore. It is amazing just how much work exists on finding more about our ancient city.

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2023