In sum, apart from his prohibition on building new temples in Banaras, Aurangzeb's policies respecting temples within imperial domains generally followed those of his predecessors. Viewing temples within their domains as state property, Aurangzeb and Ind o- Muslim rulers in general punished disloyal Hindu officers in their service by desecrating temples with which they were associated.
How, one might then ask, did they punish disloyal Muslim officers? Since officers in all Indo-Muslim states belonged to hierarchically ranked service cadres, infractions short of rebellion normally resulted in demotions in rank, while serious crimes like treason were generally punished by execution, regardless of the perpetrator's religious affiliation. No evidence, however, suggests that ruling authorities attacked public monuments like mosques or Sufi shrines that had been patronised by disloyal or re bellious officers. Nor were such monuments desecrated when one Indo-Muslim kingdom conquered another and annexed its territories.
On the contrary, new rulers were quick to honour and support the shrines of those Chishti shaikhs that had been patronised by defeated enemies. For example, Babur, upon seizing Delhi from the last of the city's ruling sultans in 1526, lost no time in pat ronising the city's principal Chishti tomb-shrines. 16 The pattern was repeated as the Mughals expanded into provinces formerly governed by Indo-Muslim rulers. Upon conquering Bengal in 1574, Mughal administrators showered their most lavish patronage on the two Chishti shrines in Pandua - those of Shaikh `Ala al-Haq (d. 1398) and Shaikh Nur Qutb-i `Alam (d. 1459) - that had been the principal objects of state patronage by the previous dynasty of Bengal sultans.17 And when he extended Mughal dominion over the defeated Muslim states o f the Deccan, the dour Aurangzeb, notwithstanding his reputation for eschewing the culture of saint-cults, made sizable contributions to those Chishti shrines in Khuldabad and Gulbarga that had helped legitimise earlier Muslim dynasties there.18
TEMPLES AND MOSQUES CONTRASTED
Evidence presented in the foregoing discussion suggests that mosques or shrines carried very different political meanings than did royal temples in independent Hindu states, or temples patronised by Hindu officers serving in Indo-Muslim states. For Indo- Muslim rulers, building mosques was considered an act of royal piety, even a duty. But all the actors, rulers and the ruled alike, seem to have recognised that the deity worshipped in mosques or shrines had no personal connection with a Muslim monarch. N or were such monuments thought of as underpinning the authority of an Indo-Muslim king, or as projecting a claim of sovereign authority over the particular territory in which they were situated. One can hardly imagine the central focus of a mosque's ritu al activity, the prayer niche (mihrab), being taken out of the structure and paraded around a Muslim capital by way of displaying Allah's co-sovereignty over an Indo-Muslim ruler's kingdom, in the manner that the ritual focus of a royal temple, th e image of the state-deity, was paraded around pre-modern Hindu capitals in elaborate "car" festivals.
