REBIRTH 193and no religion had the whole truth, so he decided to take the best from
each and blend them into a single new religion he called Din-i Illahi,
"the God Religion." The doctrines of this new religion included, first,
that God was a single, all-powerful unity; second, that the universe was
a single integrated whole reflecting its creator; third, that every person's
first religious obligation was to do no harm to others; and fourth, that
people could and should model themselves on Perfect Lives, of which
many examples existed-Mohammed provided such a model, said
Akbar, and so did the Shi'i imams. Akbar went on to suggest modestly
that he himself provided yet another.
Ablaze with fervor for his new religion, Akbar built a whole new city
dedicated to it. Constructed of red sandstone, Fatehpur Sikri rose in the
desert around the grave and shrine of Akbar's favorite Sufi mystic. The
main building here was the private-audience hall, a single large room that
had a high domed ceiling and only one element of furniture: a tall pillar
connected by catwalks to balconies along the walls. Akbar sat atop this
pillar. People who wanted to petition the emperor addressed him from
the balconies. Courtiers and other interested parties listened from the
floor below.
It's a testament to Akbar's charm and majesty that no one revolted
against him for trying to promulgate his new religion, but the religion did
not take. It wasn't Muslim enough for Muslims or Hindu enough for Hin-
dus. Fatehpur Sikri didn't last, either: its water sources dried up and the
city withered.
But Akbar's ideas had not sprung full-blown out of nothing. Move-
ments to blend the best of Islam and Hinduism had been percolating on
the subcontinent since Babur's days, with mysticism providing the point of
intersection. In 1499, for example, a man named Nanak had a religious ex-
perience that led him to declare, "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim."
Although born Hindu, he reached toward Sufism and devoted his life to
rejecting and repudiating the caste system. He launched a tradition of spir-
itual techniques transmitted directly from master to initiate, echoing both
Hindu masters and Sufi saints. Guru Nanak's followers ended up calling
themselves Sikhs, a new religion.
A contemporary of Guru Nanak's, the illiterate poet Kabir, was born of
a widowed Hindu mother but raised by a family of Muslim weavers. He