"Even more unexpected is the divorce of the Muslim part of the history of medieval India from the study of Islam as a religion and as a system of thought in its wider extra-Indian setting. Thus, the discussion of the posture of the sultans of Delhi and of the Mughal padshahs towards the Muslim religious establishment—of such questions as whether, for example, the Delhi sultanate was in any sense a theocracy or whether Akbar’s religious activities were unislamic, was kept isolated from a general consideration of the background of Islamic ideas on government as they had developed historically and from a consideration of the actual currents of religious thought and feeling in the Muslim community in Akbar’s time. In such a standard work as Vincent. Smith’s Akbar, The Great Mogol, no attempt is made to examine what constituted orthodoxy and unorthodoxy among Muslims of that time, or to describe the content of the religious controversies in which Akbar was involved in the light of developments in Muslim thinking outside India. It seemed to be assumed that Indian Islam was more Indian than Islamic and that it was proper to interpret the aspiration of Islam to be both a religious and a political order as in practice an aspiration merely to be a political order."