A Dawat Newly Rooted in India
By the time the Mughal Empire consolidated its hold over Gujarat in the late 16th century, the headquarters of the Tayyibi Dawat had only recently shifted from Yemen to India. After centuries in which the Dais al-Mutlaq led the community from Yemeni strongholds (see Dai Al Mutlaq Institution), the leadership passed for the first time to an Indian-born Dai, and the operational seat of the Dawat moved to Gujarat in the period following the death of the 24th Da’i, Syedna Yusuf Najmuddin (RA), originally of Sidhpur. From roughly 974 AH / 1567 CE onward the central administration of the da’wa came to rest at Ahmedabad, then a flourishing commercial city within the Mughal province of Gujarat.
This relocation placed the Dais directly under Mughal political authority. The community — concentrated in towns such as Ahmedabad, Patan, Sidhpur, and Cambay — was overwhelmingly mercantile, and its fortunes were therefore bound up with the stability, taxation, and religious temper of Mughal governance. The era that followed was not uniform: it alternated between stretches of tolerance and imperial favor and episodes of harsh local persecution, often driven less by central policy than by the disposition of provincial governors (subahdars) and hostile officials.
Akbar’s Recognition of the 27th Da’i
The most celebrated instance of Mughal patronage came under Emperor Akbar (r. 963–1014 AH / 1556–1605 CE), whose comparatively pluralist approach to religion offered the Dawat a measure of protection. Following the death of the 26th Da’i, Syedna Dawood bin Ajabshah (RA), at Ahmedabad in 999 AH / 1591 CE, a dispute over the succession arose. The great majority of the Indian community recognized Syedna Dawood bin Qutubshah (RA) as the 27th Da’i al-Mutlaq, while Sulayman bin Hasan, the late Dai’s deputy in Yemen, advanced a competing claim. The contest hardened into the permanent division between the Dawoodi and Sulaymani communities — the defining schism from which the Dawoodi Bohra take their name (see Bohra History).
The dispute, together with local persecution of the community, was brought to the Mughal court. According to community accounts, hostile officials in Gujarat had arrested community elders and seized Bohra properties, prompting reports of these abuses to reach the emperor. Akbar summoned Syedna Dawood bin Qutubshah (RA) to court around 1005 AH / 1597 CE; the Dai is said to have been escorted northward and received in Akbar’s presence (the imperial court being then in the Lahore–Kashmir region). After inquiry, the emperor upheld the position of Syedna Dawood (RA) and permitted his return to Ahmedabad under royal safeguard. This episode is remembered in the community as a moment when imperial authority shielded the Dawat rather than threatened it — though the precise dates and details vary among sources and should be treated with some caution.
Persecution and the Martyrdom of the 32nd Da’i
The protection enjoyed under Akbar did not endure unbroken. The reign of his great-grandson did not directly govern Gujarat in the relevant years, but it was the future emperor Aurangzeb — then serving as the Mughal subahdar (governor) of Gujarat under his father Shah Jahan, c. 1645–1647 CE — who presided over the gravest catastrophe of the era for the Dawoodi Bohra.
The 32nd Da’i al-Mutlaq, Syedna Qutub Khan Qutbuddin (RA) — known thereafter as Qutbuddin Shaheed, “the Martyr” — was born at Ahmedabad and assumed the office of Dai in 1054 AH / 1646 CE, succeeding the 31st Da’i, Syedna Qasim Khan Zainuddin (RA). His tenure lasted only a little over a year. A hostile official, recorded in community tradition as Abdul Qawi, brought charges of heresy against him, alleging deviance from accepted belief. The Dai’s extensive personal library was confiscated and examined by scholars, yet — by the community’s account — nothing blasphemous or heterodox could be found in it. Summoned to answer for his faith, Syedna Qutbuddin (RA) is said to have affirmed his adherence to the testimony of faith, prayer, zakat, the fast of Ramadan, and the Hajj, and refused to recant.
Despite the failure to substantiate the accusations, the execution was approved while Aurangzeb held the governorship, and Syedna Qutbuddin Shaheed (RA) was beheaded at Ahmedabad on 27 Jumada al-Ukhra 1056 AH (corresponding to 1646 CE; the precise Gregorian day is given variously in the sources). He is venerated as the first Da’i al-Mutlaq to be martyred for the faith, and the community draws a deliberate parallel between his sacrifice and that of Imam al-Husayn (AS). His urus is commemorated annually on 27 Jumada al-Ukhra, and his shrine at Ahmedabad remains a place of pilgrimage. He was succeeded by the 33rd Da’i, Syedna Feer Khan Shujauddin (RA).
Navigating the Empire: Movement and Survival
The martyrdom of 1056 AH crystallized a broader reality: under the Mughal state the Dawat’s security depended heavily on local conditions, and the leadership repeatedly relocated its seat to safer ground. Ahmedabad served as the principal residence of the Dais for roughly nine decades, spanning the tenures of several Dais from the mid-16th century. In the period after the martyrdom, as the religious climate of the later Mughal era grew less hospitable — Aurangzeb’s long reign as emperor (1068–1118 AH / 1658–1707 CE) being marked by a more rigorous Sunni orthodoxy — the seat of the Dawat moved away from Ahmedabad.
By community accounts the administrative seat shifted in stages: to Jamnagar (in Kathiawar) in the mid-17th century, and subsequently inland into central India — to Ujjain and Burhanpur in the 18th century — before settling at Surat toward the close of the 1700s. These movements reflect a community managing risk: drawing on the relative autonomy of princely and regional powers, the mercantile networks that linked Gujarat to the Deccan, and the protection that distance from a hostile provincial court could provide. The exact chronology and the list of intermediate seats differ between sources, and individual dates should be regarded as approximate.
Throughout, the Bohra community’s commercial standing helped sustain it. As traders integral to the economies of Gujarat’s port cities and the overland routes of the Deccan, the Bohras retained a degree of usefulness to local rulers that could temper hostility. Yet the era left a permanent imprint on communal memory: the figure of Qutbuddin Shaheed (RA) became a touchstone of steadfastness under persecution, and the experience of navigating powerful, sometimes antagonistic, imperial authority shaped the community’s characteristic combination of discretion, internal cohesion, and loyalty to the institution of the Dai al-Mutlaq.
Legacy of the Mughal Centuries
The Mughal period was formative for the Dawoodi Bohra in several lasting ways. It was during these centuries that the Dawat became firmly Indian in its base, with leadership, scholarship, and population centered in Gujarat and the Deccan rather than Yemen. It was also during this period that the decisive Dawoodi–Sulaymani division took permanent shape, fixing the boundaries of the community as it exists today (see Duat Mutlaqeen). And it produced, in the martyrdom of the 32nd Dai, one of the most powerful narratives of sacrifice in Bohra history — a story understood by the community as continuous with the trials of the Ahl al-Bayt (see Ahl Al Bayt) and the broader heritage of the Fatimid Caliphate.
The alternation of patronage and persecution under the Mughals — Akbar’s protection at one pole, Qutbuddin Shaheed’s (RA) martyrdom at the other — illustrates the precariousness of minority religious leadership within a vast imperial order, and the resilience with which the Dawat preserved its continuity through it. For a community whose identity rests on an unbroken chain of Dais, the survival of that chain across the turbulence of Mughal India is itself a central article of its historical self-understanding.