It was not till two years after our father had been summoned to paradise that we first took our seat on the peacock throne. We then felt we should fulfil the mission that we had been charged with by Allah. We ordered our commanders Mir Jumla, Shaista Khan and others to extend the domains of Islam to the furthermost corners of Hindustan. Our victorious armies marched eastwards to Chatgaon, northwards over the mountains to Tibet, westwards beyond Kabul and southwards beyond Karnatak. In turn we crushed the Jats, the Rajputs, mischievous sects of the Satnamis and Nanak Prasthas who had raised their heads against us. We ravaged the lands of the wily Marathas and forced their leader, Shiva, to pay homage to us. We levelled temples of idolatry to dust and raised mosques on their ruins. We imposed the jazia tax on non-believers to induce them to tread the righteous path. In everything we did, our only guide was the holy law of the shariat. We forbade the distillation of liquor and severely punished those we suspected to be under its influence. It was a common saying that when we ascended the throne there were only two men in all Hindustan, ourselves and the chief qazi, who did not drink. Within a few years we made drink a rarity. Since drinking was often indulged in to the accompaniment of dancing and singing, we forbade them too. We forced prostitutes and dancing girls to marry or leave our empire. Once when musicians and singers carried fake biers of corpses of music and dance, and accosted us as we were going for our Friday prayers, we told them to bury the corpses so deep that they would never rise again. Our Mussalman subjects were happy with our ordinances and acclaimed us as Zinda Peer (a Living Saint.)

We waged a ceaseless war against the infidel, wherever he raised his serpentine hood we crushed it under foot. Most of our later years were spent in the Deccan contending with the mountain rats that Shiva had bred. We caught his son Sambha and sent him to eternal damnation. However, we realized that the land would not be purged of idolatry in our lifetime and exhorted our sons to keep up the crusade.

Other kings would have treated the state treasury as their personal property and wasted it in extravagant living, women, wine, jewels and monuments. We looked upon ourselves as God’s chosen custodian to use it for the good of the people. On ourselves we spent no more than the poorest of our subjects. We sewed prayer caps and made copies of the holy Quran: whatever we got for them in the market we spent on our food and personal raiment. How many monarchs who ruled empires as large as ours could claim to have lived like dervishes as we had done?