The Tax That Came Back

Aurangzeb, who took the Mughal throne in 1658 after a war of succession against his more religiously eclectic brother Dara Shikoh, governed by a stricter reading of Islamic law than any Mughal emperor before him, and the contrast with Akbar's court a century earlier is usually read as deliberate. In 1679 he reimposed the jizya on non-Muslim subjects that Akbar had abolished, a levy the Encyclopaedia of Islam's account of Mughal religious policy treats as the clearest single marker of the reversal between the two reigns. Aurangzeb also ordered the destruction of a number of Hindu temples, including prominent sites at Varanasi and Mathura, framed in surviving court orders as responses to specific provocations rather than a blanket policy, though the scale and motivation remain debated among historians working from incomplete and sometimes contradictory Mughal court records.

At the same time Aurangzeb sponsored the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, a vast compilation of Hanafi Islamic legal rulings assembled by a board of scholars at his direction, intended to give Mughal India a single authoritative code rather than leaving judges to rule from scattered and sometimes conflicting precedent. The work outlasted the empire that commissioned it and continued to be consulted in South Asian Islamic law long after Mughal rule ended, a longer institutional life than either the jizya's return or the temple destructions it is usually discussed alongside.