THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 139

. THE APPLICATION OF ISLAMIC IDEAS

In the preceding section the general situation in the early
part of Aurangzeb’s reign has been described with the aid
of both the extant farmans issued under his authority.
[t remains to examine those provisions of the later order
which relate specifically to Islamic law, and in doing this,
it is necessary to realise the position of the ecclesiastical
jurists on whose pronouncements ( fatwa) the order is
obviously based. There is no reason to suppose that the
jurists were in touch with the actual working of the Revenue
Ministry; their authorities consisted, not of rules and orders
issued by Sher Shah or Akbar, but of law-books and commentaries
 written, for the most part, in other parts of Asia,
in Arabia, Syria, or Iraq. The authorities are duly quoted
in the extant fatwas, and we find among them such names
as Abd Hanifa, Muhit, or Abi Yiisuf, men whose experience
had been gained long before, and in countries altogether
different from India. The officials who drafted the farman
obviously followed the fatwas closely; and the result was
necessarily to import into the Indian system terms, ideas,
and institutions, which are not easily brought into accordance
 with the facts of Indian life.
As an example of exotic terminology, we may take the
description of the peasant as malik, a word which originally
denoted a king, but in process of time has come to mean
an owner. The anonymous commentator whose observatons
 are included in Professor Sarkar’s translation of the
farmin was obviously puzzled by the unfamiliar term, for he
suggested that the word must refer to the owner of the crop,
implying that there could not be an owner of the soil;
but the fact is that malik was the term used, no doubt
appropriately, in other Islamic countries, and it was carried
over to India, where it was not applicable to the local conditions.
 Similarly as regards ideas, the force of parts of
the farmin is distorted by the conception of land devoted
permanently to a particular crop. We are given detailed
rules for land under dates and almonds, which were almost
irrelevant in India, but we find nothing about the particular
 difficulties connected with characteristic Indian