Author: Shuja Butt, Muhammad Irfan

Annotation: This article examines the concept of justice (ʿadl, dād) in the poetry and political thought of Zahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483–1530), the great son of Andijan and founder of the Mughal dynasty. It situates Babur within the Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongol traditions of royal justice — the “circle of justice” of the mirror-for-princes literature and the customary law of the steppe — and then traces how these inherited ideals are refracted through his own writings. Three registers are distinguished. In the memoirs, justice appears as narrated practice: the graded punishment of wrongdoers, the protection of the peasantry from plundering soldiers, and the evaluation of rulers past and present by the measure of equity. In the dīvān, justice appears as a poetic ethic: the celebrated quatrain on fidelity and cruelty formulates a law of moral reciprocity, while the complaint against the tyranny of fate constructs, by inversion, the image of the just king as the answer to an unjust world. In the didactic works, justice appears as promulgation: the versified law-book and the ethical translations enact the sovereign’s duty to teach the right order. The article argues that in Babur’s corpus justice is not one theme among many but the hinge that joins his poetry to his politics: the quality by which he judges the world, judges himself, and asks to be judged.

Keywords: Babur, justice, ʿadl, circle of justice, political thought, Chaghatay poetry, mirror for princes, Timurid tradition.

Pages in journal: 145 - 151