Forty-nine years and a taqiyyah cap

Aurangzeb Alamgir ruled the Mughal Empire from 1658 to 1707, the longest of any Mughal, over 158 million subjects, roughly a quarter of the world's population at the time. He was a hafiz of the Quran. He copied Qurans by hand. He funded his own expenses by stitching taqiyyah caps. His grave, per his own instruction, is an open plot in the earth.

Muhi al-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb was born on 3 November 1618 CE in Dahod, in what is now Gujarat. He was the third son of Prince Khurram, later the emperor Shah Jahan, and Mumtaz Mahal, the woman for whom Shah Jahan would later build the Taj Mahal after her death in 1631. Aurangzeb was twelve when his mother died in childbirth. He was raised the rest of his childhood in the court at Agra.

He was, from adolescence, a serious student of Islamic sciences. He memorised the Quran. He studied Arabic, Persian, and Hindi. He studied Hanafi jurisprudence under the ulama of the court. He studied the Sunna in the standard hadith collections. He was, by seventeen, a hafiz, a recognised memoriser of the Quran capable of reciting the whole book from memory in the daily tarawih of Ramadan.

He was also a general from his teens. His father Shah Jahan appointed him governor of the Deccan at 17. He fought in the Deccan wars against the Bijapur and Golconda sultanates. He led armies at Balkh in Central Asia at 22. He was the most militarily gifted of Shah Jahan's four sons, the eldest, Dara Shukoh, was a scholar of Islamic mysticism and Vedantic Hindu philosophy but not a soldier; Shuja was a governor of Bengal, capable but not exceptional; Murad Bakhsh was a governor of Gujarat with a reputation for cruelty.

Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in 1657 and was not expected to recover. The war of succession followed. Over 1657-1659 the four brothers fought each other across the empire. Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shukoh at the battle of Samugarh in May 1658 and captured Delhi. He imprisoned his father Shah Jahan in the Red Fort of Agra, from whose bedroom window his father could see the Taj Mahal, the tomb of his wife. Shah Jahan lived there another eight years, effectively under house arrest, and died in 1666.

Aurangzeb declared himself emperor in July 1658, taking the imperial title Alamgir, "Seizer of the World." He ruled from 1658 to his death in 1707, forty-nine years, the longest reign of any Mughal.

His personal life was famously austere. He wore mended clothes. He ate simple food. He slept on a plain rope-bed. He refused all luxuries in his personal quarters even as he maintained the imperial ceremony that his position required in public. He is said to have funded his own household expenses, food, clothing, ordinary necessities, by copying the Quran by hand and by stitching taqiyyah caps, and selling both through anonymous intermediaries. He would not draw on state funds for personal use. The imperial treasury paid for the empire; his household paid for him.

He was a hafiz throughout his life. He is said to have led the tarawih prayer himself in his private mosque during Ramadan. He copied the Quran in his own hand at least twice in the classical Arabic calligraphic tradition, the surviving manuscripts are in Indian and Pakistani libraries. His personal library, catalogued at his death, included the great works of Hanafi jurisprudence, the tafsir tradition, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, and the poetry of Rumi and Hafez.

His public policies are more controversial. He revoked his great-grandfather Akbar's syncretic religious policies. He reintroduced the jizya on non-Muslim subjects in 1679, a tax that had been abolished by Akbar for nearly a century. He ordered several important Hindu temples destroyed. He commissioned the great Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, a compilation of Hanafi jurisprudence in 30 volumes that took the ulama of the empire eight years to complete, still one of the standard reference works of Hanafi law today.

His Deccan wars, twenty-seven years of campaigning against the Marathas under Shivaji and his son Sambhaji, drained the imperial treasury and stretched the army beyond its capacity to hold together. His son Muazzam (later Bahadur Shah I) rebelled against him in the 1680s and was pardoned. His son Akbar rebelled against him in 1681 and fled to Persia. His youngest son Kam Bakhsh remained loyal but was politically inexperienced. When Aurangzeb died on 3 March 1707 CE at the age of 88, the succession war that followed among his sons initiated the two-century Mughal decline that ended in the British Raj.

His personal instructions for his death were specific and preserved in his own hand. He wrote to his son Azam Shah in his final months: "I have not done well for the sake of the state or the people. I have not appropriately guarded the realm. Life, so valuable, has passed away without a purpose. God is here, but my dim eyes cannot see His splendour."

He asked to be buried in the simplest way possible. No grand mausoleum. No mosque built over him. A plain grave in the open earth at Khuldabad, near the shrine of the Sufi saint Zainuddin Shirazi in what is now Maharashtra. His grave was to be paid for from money he had personally earned by copying the Quran. He forbade any inscription except his name.

His grave is there today. It is a bare rectangular plot of earth open to the sky, surrounded by a low stone wall, with a small unmarked headstone. The last emperor of the greatest Muslim empire of the medieval world lies under bare earth in a village in Maharashtra. Visitors leave rose petals. The rain washes them away.

What the story teaches

Aurangzeb is the most controversial figure the classical Muslim tradition has to reckon with in the second millennium of Islam. He was personally pious to a degree few rulers of any age have matched. He was administratively brilliant. He compiled the greatest single work of Hanafi jurisprudence in a thousand years. He held the largest Muslim empire of the age together for nearly half a century. And he simultaneously alienated the Hindu majority of India by reversing Akbar's syncretic settlement, wasted the empire's resources in the endless Deccan wars, and left his sons a state that would begin to disintegrate the day he died. The classical Muslim scholars who have engaged with his legacy, including modern figures like Shibli Nomani and Muhammad Iqbal, have taken opposite readings. Some see him as the last great defender of Sunni orthodoxy against dissolution, the emperor whose personal piety and administrative rigour bought the ummah of the subcontinent an extra century of Muslim rule. Others see him as the ruler whose rigidity fractured a functioning multi-confessional empire and prepared the political conditions for its collapse. Both readings acknowledge the scale and the seriousness of the man. His grave, a bare plot of earth open to the sky, funded by his own hand-copied Qurans, unmarked except by his name, is a monument to a specific paradox the classical Muslim tradition has never quite resolved: piety without political wisdom is not enough, but neither is political wisdom without piety, and the ruler who combines both without contradiction is one of the rarest human beings in history. Aurangzeb, on his own testimony in his last letter to his son, was not that ruler. He was piety without the political wisdom to know how to use it. His grave is what he left of himself. The empire was already crumbling.