The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c20.347

v3.c20.347

One of his first acts was to provide for surviving females of the Khaljī house by suitable marriages. He pursued and punished with great severity all who had been in any way concerned in marrying the beautiful Deval Devī to the vile upstart Khusrav; he provided with lands and employment all old officials who had faithfully served the fallen dynasty, and he distributed appointments among his own adherents, the chief of whom, Fakhr-ud-dīn Muhammad Jauna Khān, his eldest son, received the title of Ulugh Khān and was designated heir apparent; he recovered the treasure which had been lavished by the usurper or had been plundered during the confusion of his short reign, and thus replenished his empty treasury. In giving effect to this unpopular measure he encountered much difficulty and opposition. Khusrav, in order to conciliate the professors of the dominant religion, had made large gifts, ostensibly for charitable purposes, to the leading *shaikhs*, or religious teachers. Three of these had refused to touch any money coming from a source so polluted and most of those who had feared to refuse the gift had prudently kept the money in deposit and restored it when called upon to do so, but Shaikh Nizām-ud-dīn Auliyā, the most renowned of them all, who had received as much as half a million *tangas*, replied that he had at once distributed in charity all that he had received and was not in position to make restitution. Public opinion forbade, in the case of a religious leader so prominent and so renowned for sanctity, the torture or duress to which humbler delinquents were subjected and the king was obliged to accept the explanation instead of the money, but the Shaikh was a marked man, and was almost immediately denounced for indulgence in the ecstatic songs and dances of *darvīshes*, a form of devotion regarded as unlawful by rigid Sunnis of the established religion. Tughluq summoned him before an assembly of fifty-three theologians, and though he was forced to bow to their decision that these religious exercises were not unlawful, relations between him and the Shaikh remained strained until his death, in which it is not improbable that the Shaikh was implicated.