Humanity in a New Age

Shah Waliullah of Delhi weak that there was no possibility of its survival for any significant length of time. Despite this, Shah Waliullah continued to have great expectations of it. In his Al-Tafhimat al-Ilahiyyah, he addressed the Muslim Sultans of his times, telling them that it is God’s will that they must draw out their swords and not put them back in their sheaths until God ‘establishes a distinction between Muslims and polytheists’ and until ‘unbelievers’ had been so suppressed that they were rendered wholly powerless. He claimed that God had commanded that the Muslim Sultans wage war against non-Muslims until fitnah or strife was abolished and religion remained entirely for God. (Al-Tafhimat alIlahiyyah, 1936, Vol. 1, pp. 215-16) In reality, the nominal Muslim powers that Shah Waliullah turned to had by his own time become so weakened as to be almost non-existent. The Mughal Empire was wracked with internecine strife, with rival claimants to the throne killing each other. To lecture about ‘jihad through the sword’ to such a Sultanate was tantamount to singing a martial song to a corpse. Shah Waliullah is credited with saving the tottering Mughal Empire in the popular Muslim imagination. Through Nawab Najibud-Daulah, he invited Ahmad Shah Abdali, ruler of Kabul, to invade India. Abdali