Consider the following events and arrange them in chronological order :
1. Murder of Abul Fazl
2. Death of Sheikh Mubarak
3. Death of Faizi
4. Death of Daniyal
Select the correct answer from the codes

Question

Consider the following events and arrange them in chronological order :
1. Murder of Abul Fazl
2. Death of Sheikh Mubarak
3. Death of Faizi
4. Death of Daniyal
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, 2, 3, 1, 4. Three of the four names belong to a single family, and once you see that, the sequence almost writes itself: Shaikh Mubarak of Nagaur was the father, and Faizi and Abul Fazl were his sons, so the father goes first. (2) Shaikh Mubarak, born at Nagaur in 1505-06, was the philosopher-theologian whose liberal reading of Islamic law gave Akbar the legal cover for his religious experiments — he is the scholar generally credited with drafting the mahzar of 1579 that made the emperor the final arbiter in disputed questions of religious law. He died before either son; references differ on the exact year (the Encyclopaedia of Islam gives 995 AH / 1587, Indian textbooks commonly say 1593), but every account puts his death in the years before Faizi's. (3) Faizi — Abu al-Faiz ibn Mubarak, born at Agra on 20 September 1547, the elder brother, whom Akbar made malik-ush-shuara, poet laureate of the court, in 1588 and tutor to the princes — died at Lahore on 15 October 1595. (1) Abul Fazl, born at Agra on 14 January 1551, Akbar's chief adviser from 1579 and the author of the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari, was murdered in August 1602 while returning from the Deccan: he was ambushed between Sarai Vir and Antri, near Narwar, by Vir Singh Deo Bundela, in a plot contrived by Akbar's eldest son Prince Salim, who had his severed head sent to him at Allahabad. (4) Daniyal Mirza, Akbar's third son, born at Ajmer on 11 September 1572, drank himself to death at Burhanpur on 19 March 1605 — about seven months before Akbar's own death on 27 October 1605. So the order is Shaikh Mubarak → Faizi → Abul Fazl → Daniyal = 2, 3, 1, 4, which is option (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Right start, wrong finish. It correctly puts Shaikh Mubarak first, but then sends Faizi to the very end — after Abul Fazl (1602) and after Daniyal (1605). Faizi died in October 1595, seven years before his younger brother was killed, and Akbar's grief at his death is one of the well-known scenes of the reign. Any sequence that outlives Faizi past 1595 is wrong.  (b) This is the family-tree trap: it places Faizi ahead of Shaikh Mubarak, i.e. the son dying before the father. Shaikh Mubarak was born in 1505-06 and was an old man by the 1580s; his sons were born in 1547 and 1551. Whichever year you accept for Mubarak's death — 1587 or 1593 — it precedes Faizi's death in 1595.  (d) It opens correctly with Shaikh Mubarak, then jumps straight to Daniyal, who in fact died last of the four, on 19 March 1605. It also leaves Abul Fazl's murder at the end, after Daniyal's death, whereas Abul Fazl was killed in August 1602 — nearly three years earlier, and while Daniyal was still alive and commanding in the Deccan.

Concept: Akbar's court was not only a political centre but an intellectual one, and one family sat at the heart of it. Shaikh Mubarak of Nagaur, a scholar of Greek philosophy as well as Islamic theology, ran a madrasa at Agra; his sons Faizi and Abul Fazl carried his liberal, rationalist temper into the imperial service. Faizi became poet laureate; Abul Fazl became Akbar's closest adviser and the official chronicler whose Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari are still the primary sources for the reign. Against them stood the orthodox chronicler Abd al-Qadir Badauni, whose Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh gives the hostile version of the same events. Daniyal, the fourth name, belongs to a different thread — Akbar's own sons and the succession crisis of his last years.

State PCS 2024 Q132 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q132 — History PYQ with Answer