Indian Political Thought

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Zia Barani: Good Sultan and Ideal Polity

Himanshu Roy and Muzaffar Alam

Zia Barani¹ (1283–1359) was the most important political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate, particularly during the reigns of Alauddin Khalji, Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firoz Tughlaq. He represented the idea of political expediency in the Islamic history. His Fatawa-i-Jahandari (AD 1357), written as nasihat (advices) for the Muslim kings, is a classic work on statecraft which can be compared with Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Machiavelli’s Prince. For his emphasis on following the Shariat (laws of the Quran and the Prophet’s tradition) (Advice II) and his views on the Hindus (Advice XI.2), however, he has been called a conservative, a fundamentalist and a bigot as compared to ...