192 DESTINY DISRUPTED
most remarkable monarch of his age, a contemporary and equal of Eng-
land's Queen Elizabeth. His father managed to win his throne back just in
time for Akbar to celebrate his twelfth birthday as a prince. Shortly after
that, his father heard the call to prayer when he was standing at the top of
a staircase in his library and had a sudden inspiration to reform his life. He
hustled down to start living as a saint but on the way down tripped and
broke his neck, which put his teenaged son on the throne.
Akbar consolidated his grandfather's conquests, extended them, and set
his whole empire in order. These achievements alone would have made
him an important monarch, but Akbar was much more than a conqueror.
Early on, he recognized his empire's key weakness: a small group of
Muslims was attempting to rule a vast population of Hindus, whom Mus-
lims had been sacking, pillaging, looting, and killing since the days of Sul-
tan Mahmud the Ghaznavid, some five centuries earlier. Akbar attacked
this flaw with a principle he called sulahkul, "universal tolerance." To prove
his sincerity, he married a Hindu princess and declared her first son his heir.
Akbar opened all government positions to Hindus on equal terms with
Muslims. He abolished a punitive tax Muslim rulers of this region had
long imposed on pilgrims visiting Hindu shrines. Akbar also eliminated
the jizya, the Qur'anic tax on non-Muslims. He replaced both with a land
tax that applied uniformly to all citizens, high and low. Virtually no other
state in the world at this time taxed the nobility, but Akbar broke the
mold. He also ordered his troops to protect the shrines and holy places of
all religions, not just Islam.
This great Moghul emperor abolished the standing military aristocracy
on which his predecessors had depended and set up an administrative sys-
tem in which every official was appointed and could hold office for only a
specified period, after which he had to move on to a new job in another
place. Essentially, Akbar pioneered the concept of term limits, interrupting
a process that had produced all too many troublemaking regional warlords
in the past.
Born and raised a Muslim, Akbar certainly considered himself a Mus-
lim monarch, but he was deeply curious about other religions. He called
leading Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians, Buddhists,
and others to his court to explain and debate their views while the em-
peror listened. Finally Akbar decided every religion had some truth in it