If you’re interested in kingship in its charismatic or its sacred aspects, then this is a book for you, whether or not you have a particular interest in Mughal India, Safavid Iran or Timurid Central Asia. I have never read a book that so enlightened me on kingship; it was a revelation.

Like every history that knocks my socks off lately, it calls itself anthropological and ethnographic. What does that entail? In this case, that he puts aside the ‘intellectual tradition’ by which we tend to write of Islamic statecraft in the past: the prescriptive literature, doctrine, law, political theory, mirrors for princes. Because kings didn’t necessarily operate by the intellectual tradition. Moin looks at practice, at acts, more or less naked of the the highbrow level of culture.

Another thing he does is ignore present-day political or religious frontiers, which capture too much written history in divides that weren’t applicable back then. This means he passes freely from Central Asia to Iran to India and sees connections.

Astrology and saints were in fashion; he thinks astrology is neglected now as irrational, but it was both popular practice and elite science then. Kings made cults of themselves on the pattern of Sufi saints, in a manner ‘transgressive’ or ‘heretical’ by doctrine, but that spoke to people. Akbar’s religious experimentation is put into this context; he’s the axle of the book, I suppose. Akbar is among the most fascinating if puzzling of kings, and Moin has a new way to look at him. ( )