![]() ![]() The philosophy was particularly appealing to rulers who governed over vastly diverse populations and allowed them to find justification for their authority in something that was not rooted in any particular religion.Īkbar’s imperial policy is often understood as the first step towards modern secularism. Neoplatonism, as it came to be called, was a strand of Platonic philosophy conceived by Greek philosophers of the first centuries CE such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and Iamblichus. The answer lay, Huseini realised soon afterward, in a philosophical tradition that swept through empires across the globe and particularly the Islamic world in the 16th century, and had its roots in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. “It is completely overshadowed by the Akbarnama (the official chronicle of Akbar written by his court historian Abul Fazl)… The question I asked to myself was, why were the Mughals in India writing a history of the world?” He says this rich body of work, that remains untranslated, is hardly known about. Cambridge historian Said Reza Huseini came across this eight-volume work in Persian while he was completing his postgraduate studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. ![]() The Tarikh-i Alfi or the ‘History of the Millennium’ as it came to be known was to commemorate the first Islamic millennium that would soon come to a close. In 1582-83, Mughal emperor Akbar commissioned a group of scholars to write a special piece of work - a new history of the world.
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