Law, Revenue, and a Codified Sharia

Aurangzeb governed by law and by paper. The largest religious undertaking of the reign was the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, a state commissioned digest of Hanafi jurisprudence assembled by a board of scholars over years, which gathered scattered legal opinion into one reference for the courts of the empire. It is among the most substantial acts of legal codification attempted in a premodern Muslim state, and it stayed in use long after the dynasty that produced it had gone.

Fiscal decisions carried religious weight in both directions. In 1679 he reimposed the jizya, the tax on non Muslim subjects that Akbar had abolished more than a century earlier. That was a return to classical legal practice, and in the politics of the moment it was also a demand made on communities whose loyalty was doubted. He abolished at the same time a long list of transit and market duties that jurists regarded as having no basis in law. He appointed censors to enforce public morality, stopped appearing at the jharokha window and gave up the ceremonial weighings, and cut back court music and painting, all of which had been marks of Mughal sovereignty and none of which the law required. The reign reads most coherently as an attempt to make an empire resemble the legal ideal its own jurists described.