アブル・ファズルの皇帝觀について

Abstract

During the reign of the third Mughal emperor Akbar, the imperial regime was organized and the sovereignty of the emperor established. The greatest exponent of the system was the historian Shaikh Abu'l Fazl. His conception of the emperor is spelled out in his official history of the reign of Akbar, the Akbar-nama, and in the A'in-i Akbari This concept can be summarized in the following four points. Firstly, the emperor was understood as a harmonic conductor (director) of both spiritual and earthly realms. The emperor was expected to seek universal harmony (sulh-i kull) among all his people. In his pursuit of universal harmony, he was expected to indicate the way of salvation to each class of people, bring justice to the oppressed, and sternly punish tyrants. In the pursuit of this goal, it became absolutely necessary to eliminate pre judicial treatment of various classes and peoples within the empire. Secondly, the right of the emperor was the gift of God. This conception of the emperor, when used to support the notion of the emperor as the promoter of universal harmony who superseded individual social groupings, is a spontaneously occurring way of thought that may be likened to early modern European absolutism, which was grounded in the theory of the divine right of kings. Thirdly, the emperor was thought to be the possessor of a superior nature. His fundamental nature was characterized by prescient rationality, magnanimous generosity, and impartiality. Other noble qualities were thought to be evident in the divinely endowed person of the emperor, and these attributes of the perfect person (insan al-kamil) were attributed to the emperor, just as they had been in the classical case of the prophet Mohammad. Fourthly, the emperor was seen as the guardian and protector of the world. The conception is corroborated in epithet sahib-i zaman the Lord of the Age, which was applied to Akbar by Bada'uni, an historian critical of Abu'l-Fazl. This conception of emperor is easily linked to emperor worship. In fact, according to the mahzar (declaration) of the ninth month of 1579, Akbar was ultimately recognized as having supreme religious authority approximating that of a Caliph. We need to focus on the political situation and the contemporary background of the period that made this sort of religious and philosophical way of thinking inevitable. The portrait of the emperor painted by Abu'l-Fazl does not differ from that of the classical, early-modern Indian concept of despotic monarch. This conception of Akbar had thus survived long after his own death.