The seventeenth century represented the zenith of the Mughal Empire's power, territorial reach and global influence. Best known for the construction of the Taj Mahal and other iconic monuments of early modern Indo-Islamic architecture, it was also an era when Mughal wealth, religious pluralism and cultural patronage inspired envy and awe practically the world over, including among many of the Europeans who travelled to the subcontinent and reported back on their experiences. Indeed, it was precisely in this period that the term ‘Mogul’ entered the English language as practically synonymous with conspicuous wealth and splendour. But beyond a merely superficial admiration for all the opulence that Mughal India had to offer, seventeenth-century European observers like Thomas Roe and François Bernier also expressed a keen appreciation for the openness and tolerance of the Mughals’ distinct brand of political Islam, a pluralistic approach that used state policies to promote an ideology known at the time as ‘universal civility’ (ṣulḥ-i kull). It was through such policies, Roe argued in a 1640 speech to the English Parliament, that the Mughal emperors had been able to avail themselves of the talents of all of India's multiple ethnic, religious and linguistic communities, and even to attract skilled labour, administrators, literati, scholars and artists from all over the world to their courts. Tolerance, in other words, was good for business; and it was thanks to such policies, Roe pointed out to his fellow MPs, that the reigning emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58) had managed to become the richest man in the world.

Among the many who came to India and thrived under the Mughal dispensation of ṣulḥ-i kull was a Persian statesman named Mirza (or sometimes ‘Mulla’) Shukr Allah Shirazi, better known today by his official title of Afzal Khan (d. 1639). Afzal Khan came to India early in the seventeenth century during the reign of Jahangir (r. 1605–27), the fourth of the so-called Great Mughals whose courts dominated the culture and politics of much of the Indian subcontinent until the early eighteenth century. But it was under Jahangir's successor Shah Jahan, the celebrated builder of the Taj Mahal, that Afzal Khan reached the pinnacle of his career, serving as prime minister (wazīr, or dīwān-i kull) for nearly a decade.