Later Mughals v2.c17.s4.3

v2.c17.s4.3

Shah Husain, the last of the Safawi line, who reigned from 1694 to 1722, was no doubt free from vice; but he went to the opposite extreme of meekness and religious bigotry, and did still greater harm than his dissolute predecessors. He placed the administration entirely in the hands of the priests and thus alienated the old martial and official nobility. Under the advice of the keepers of his conscience the king persecuted and banished from the land the Sufi philosophers as heretics from Islamic orthodoxy, and thus enraged the intellectual classes. But the prestige of his worthier ancestors had given the State a momentum which made it continue to go on for nearly twenty years longer.