Great Rulers Take Everyone Along: Nariman on ‘Philosopher-King’

Supreme Court judge Rohinton Nariman’s lecture was titled ‘Great Contemporaries: Akbar, Suleiman I and Elizabeth I’.

Akbar, Elizabeth I and Suleiman.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

Supreme Court judge Rohinton F Nariman recently delivered a lecture titled ‘Great Contemporaries: Akbar, Suleiman I and Elizabeth I’, in New Delhi on 14 January, which was excerpted by the Indian Express. In it, he tried to draw parallels of the three rulers with present day dignity of individuals and unity of the nation.

Nariman talked about the philosopher-king, a concept that was given by Plato in his Book 6 of Republic.

He took the example of three contemporaries because their rule coincided. Suleiman ruled from 1520 to 1566. Akbar’s rule started in 1565, and ended in 1605, and Elizabeth’s rule was co-terminus, almost exactly with Akbar’s, ending in 1603.

Akbar built the Buland Darwaza at Fatehpur Sikri, the forts to commemorate his conquests but Nariman said that the objective was to not be a thief and run away with the country’s wealth.

His great Ibadaar Khana was the first council of world religions, Nariman said.

And it is remarkable that people of every faith and hue actually visited and disputed with others or spoke about their faiths, all of which the emperor drank up…

There were followers of the materialist school which did not believe in anything, beyond existence. Sabians went there — a Sabian incidentally is a Yemeni, monotheist, and they are mentioned in the Quran as people of the book, along with Jews and Christians.

He had great respect for Zoroastrianism and it was because he was greatly taken by a Sufi saint that he decided to formulate his own religion, said Nariman.

The emperor was so great that the Muslim maulvis, who used to despise him because of his open-mindedness, ultimately issued what was called the infallibility decree in 1579 which is based on a verse of the Quran that says, if a person is like this, so learned and so brilliant, we will take our spiritual guidance from him…

Suleiman was a loved leader but a great ‘blot’ in his career as Nariman called it, was his marriage to Roxalena.

His reign again teaches us something, and teaches us that a philosopher-king is one who rules for all his subjects and is loved by all his subjects.

In one of her last speeches to the Parliament Elizabeth I said:

You may have had many greater rulers than me, but none who have loved you so well, and none who have tried to keep this nation together.

Elizabeth I

To Nariman, the virtues of other sects need to be praised by the one in power to be able to increase the influence of one’s own sect and make the others learn.

He says that the rallying cry of the French Revolution was ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’, all of which are in the Indian Preamble but much isn’t said about fraternity.

He ends by calling it a value of cardinal importance.