The Global Context of Mughal Civility; or, Rethinking What We Think about When We Think about Sulh-i Kull

The concept of sulh-i kull is well known as a core feature of the Mughal Empire’s state ideology.  Often translated as “peace with all,” the term has become almost synonymous in South Asian historiography with the policies of religious tolerance promoted by the dynasty’s most celebrated emperor, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar “the Great” (r. 1556-1605) and his famed courtier and biographer, Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak (1551-1602).  Paradoxically, however, the term’s ubiquity in discussions of Mughal religious tolerance notwithstanding, modern scholarship has actually tended to view the concept of sulh-i kull quite narrowly.  For one thing, the almost exclusive focus on how the term was understood in Akbar’s reign has limited our understanding not only of the term’s prehistory in traditions of ethical cosmopolitanism throughout the wider Indo-Persianate world, but also of its continuing relevance for later Mughal rulers and intellectuals.  Moreover, the tendency to situate the theory and practice of sulh-i kull almost exclusively in terms of the history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the subcontinent has also severely curtailed our understanding of how the term’s semantic and discursive range evolved over the course of the seventeenth century, beyond the mere question of religious tolerance and closer to something we would nowadays call “civility.”  This paper will attempt to recuperate some of this dynamic prehistory and post-Akbar evolution of the term sulh-i kull, and try to situate it against the backdrop of a larger set of ongoing debates about Islam, tolerance, and global early modernity, with some concluding thoughts on how these concepts came to be reconfigured among Indian Muslim reformers in the late nineteenth century.