The essay sets out to re-examine the relations between Catholics and Muslims in the Mughal court in the early seventeenth century, during the reign of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27). It does so by confronting two sets of source–materials, namely the letters of the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and Persian–language texts from the Mughal court. In particular it focuses on the important and neglected figure of Maulana ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, an intellectual who worked with and also studied the Europeans. The recent publication of a hitherto unknown text by him, under the title of Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, is in part the occasion for us to return to this classic theme in the historiography of cross-cultural encounters.
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