Religious Authority and Kingly Power in Delhi Sultanate

Abstract

My paper explores the intersections between religion, Islamic legitimacy, and historiography. It investigates the ways Muslim historians, living in India during a dynamic and conflictual age, attempted to narrate the religious and ethical values of Muslim courts and their sovereigns through the creative process of history writing. Significantly, it marks the first sustained political, military, and cultural presence of Turko-Persian speaking Muslims in North India. With the establishment of Muslim courts at Delhi, the sultans who ruled from there initiated a process of empire building that eventually spread across the entirety of the Indian subcontinent. While their political expansions were achieved through diplomacy, forged alliances, and the sheer force of military arms, those gains were sustained by the careful projection of Islamic religious symbols that legitimated their rule. To accomplish this, historians aligned the history of the sultans of Delhi with an idealized and universal history of Islam. In the process, Islam was interpreted and projected as a religion of empire with the mandate of divine guidance.