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 com- 
mentaries 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 ac- 
cordance 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 observa- 
tons 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 con- 
ditions. 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 par- 
ticular difficulties connected with characteristic Indian