Machine summary:
It is true that on Aurangzeb's accession his Sadr-us-Sadur refused to read the Khutba in his name and thus proclaim him emperor because his father Shah Jahan was still alive.
The entire field of the personal law of their subjects was covered by the Hindu and the Muslim Law which, the emperors admitted, they had no authority to change.
The relation between the subjects themselves as also between the State and its subjects were fundamentally governed by Muslim Law. Akbar made serious changes therein when he changed the religious policy of the State.
10 claim the right of changing the Muslim Public Law in theory, though he changed it by his practice.
Whatever may have been involved in the practices of early Muslim rulers, under the Mughals the State could not be called a theocracy.
All the Mughal emperors agreed in leaving to their Sadr the authority to declare the Muslim Law. Akbar alone claimed for himself as the righteous ruler the 1.
The matter was left there and with it came several modifications in Muslim Law and practice in India.
theory that the Muslim rulers in India were to rule here entirely as the agent of Islam.
To revert to the nature of the Mughal State then, it was a despotism of a limited nature where the ruler generally claimed to act as the agent of Islam, the exact demands of which they left themselves free to decide.
They held power and exercised authority not in their own right but as officers appointed by some far distant Muslim ruler who claimed to be the Khalifa.