194 DESTINY DISRUPTED
began spouting lyrics celebrating love in a spirit that smacked of both Su-
fism and Hinduism, and scribes recorded his utterances. The lyrics have
survived to this day.
While folk mystics in Moghul India were producing passionate lyrics
rooted in oral traditions, court poets were elaborating a complex meta-
physical style of Persian-language poetry. At the same time, Moghul artists
were developing their own more robust version of the painted "Persian"
miniatures and illuminated books.
Moghul creativity reached its apogee in architecture, which managed to
combine the solid majesty of Ottoman styles with the airy lightness of the
Safavid. The fifth Moghul monarch Shah Jahan was himself a genius in
this field. In his time, he was called the Just King, but few today remem-
ber his many political or military achievements: what they remember
about him is his consuming love for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, "ornament
of the palace," who died shortly after Shah Jahan began his reign. The
grieving emperor devoted the next twenty years to building a mausoleum
for her: the Taj Mahal. Often called the most beautiful building in the
world, the Taj Mahal is a masterpiece as singular and universally famous as
the Da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. What's as-
tounding is that the artist responsible for this tour de force had a day job
running an empire, for while many architects and designers contributed to
the Taj Mahal, it was the emperor who oversaw every detail of its con-
struction: his was the master eye.^8
Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb, the last of the great Moghuls, had no artis-
tic leanings. Music, poetry, and painting left him cold. His passion was re-
ligion, and nothing irritated him more than the tradition of tolerance his
family had pioneered in the subcontinent. Toward the end of his father's
reign, he went to war with Shah Jahan and seized power. He had the old
man clapped in a stone fortress, where the old emperor lived out his life in
a one-room cell with a single window too high for him to see through.
After his death, however, his jailers found a small mirror affixed to one
wall. In that mirror, it turned out, from his bed, Shah Jahan could view the
outside world and the only thing he could see out there through that one
high window was the Taj Mahal.
Restoring orthodox Islam to a position of privilege in the Moghul em-
pire was Aurangzeb's obsession. He was a military genius equal to his great