Muhammad Aurang Alam Kir
- Died
- 1118 AH
- Born in
- -
Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir (1028–1118 AH / 1619–1707 CE) was the sixth Mughal emperor of India and a Hanafi jurist-ruler, renowned for commissioning the encyclopedic legal reference al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya (also known as al-Fatawa al-Alamkiriyya).
Early Life and Education
Abu al-Muzaffar Muhi al-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir was born on Sunday night, 15 Dhu al-Qi'da 1028 AH, in the village of Dohad, situated between Ujjain and Baroda, during the reign of his grandfather Jahangir. His father was Shah Jahan, and his mother was Arjumand Banu Begum (Mumtaz Mahal), daughter of Asaf Jah Abu al-Hasan al-Tahrani. He memorized the Quran in his youth, mastered calligraphy, and pursued religious and rational sciences.
He studied under several prominent scholars, including Abd al-Latif al-Sultanpuri, Muhammad Hashim al-Gilani, and Muhi al-Din ibn Abd Allah al-Bihari. He trained in Naskh script under al-Hajj al-Qasim and Nasta'liq under Sayyid Ali ibn Muhammad Muqim. In Sufism, he pledged allegiance to Muhammad Ma'sum al-Sirhindi and received spiritual guidance from his son Sayf al-Din ibn Muhammad Ma'sum.
Reign and Governance
During his father's lifetime, he governed administrative territories in the Deccan. Following Shah Jahan's debilitating illness and the struggle for succession among his brothers—Dara Shikoh, Shah Shuja', and Murad Bakhsh—he overcame his rivals and assumed the throne in 1068 AH (another report gives 1069 AH). He confined his father at Agra Fort, where Shah Jahan was attended by his daughter Jahanara Begum and the scholar Sayyid Muhammad al-Husayni al-Qannawji.
His fifty-year reign expanded the borders of the empire from Khiva and Bukhara in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south, and from Somnath in the west to Puri in Orissa in the east. Upon taking power, he abolished non-canonical transit taxes (mukus) and uncustomary levies, reinstituted the jizya tax, and appointed market inspectors (muhtasibs) across his domains. He also instituted official legal representation (wakala shar'iyya) in judicial courts, assigning agents to represent claims made against the sovereign and allowing subjects to bring lawsuits against him before judges.
Legal Patronage and Scholarly Standing
Adhering strictly to the Hanafi school of law, he directed a committee of leading Indian scholars, chaired by Shaykh Nizam al-Din, to compile the authoritative positions and judicial rulings of the school into a comprehensive six-volume code, known as al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya or al-Fatawa al-Alamkiriyya, expending two hundred thousand currency units on its completion and mandating that state judges rule in accordance with it. The compendium achieved wide circulation across the Hejaz, Egypt, Syria, and Ottoman lands.
Biographers highlighted his personal asceticism, noting that he abstained from unlawful garments and gold vessels, strictly observed congregational prayers, and supported himself during Ramadan through his own handiwork. An accomplished calligrapher, he copied two full manuscripts of the Quran by hand, dispatching one to Mecca and the other to Medina.
Death
He died while engaged in military campaigns in the Deccan in Dhu al-Qi'da 1118 AH (another account gives 1119 AH) after ruling for fifty years. He was succeeded by his son Muhammad Mu'azzam (Bahadur Shah I).
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List of Works
Also widely known as al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya, this work is a seventeenth-century encyclopedic compendium of Hanafi jurisprudence. Commissioned to assemble the authoritative and relied-upon rulings of the Hanafi school across all legal domains into a single standardized work, it compiles legal cases, rulings, and judicial precedents preferred for issuing formal legal opinions from classical sources.