REBIRTH 195grandfather Akbar, and like Akbar he ruled for forty-nine years, so he had
time and power to work deep changes in the subcontinent.
The changes he sought and wrought were exactly the opposite of those
promoted by his great-grandfather Akbar the Great. He reinstated the
jizya. He reimposed special taxes on Hindus. He had his security forces de-
molish all new Hindu shrines. He expelled Hindus from government po-
sitions and went to war with the Rajputs, semiautonomous Hindu rulers
in the south, in order to bring them more firmly under the power of his
Moghul government and the Muslim clerical establishment, India's ulama.
Aurangzeb also tried to exterminate the Sikhs. Guru Nanak had been a
resolute pacifist, but Aurangzeb's persecution transformed the Sikhs into a
warrior sect whose sacred ritual objects ever since have included a long,
curved knife carried by every pious Sikh man.
Even though the last of the Moghul titans was a grim zealot, this dy-
nasty cut a fiery swath through history, and at its peak, around the year
1600, it was surely one of the world's three greatest and most powerful
emptres.
Indeed, in the year 1600, a traveler could sail from the islands of In-
donesia to Bengal, cross India, go over the Hindu Kush to the steppes
north of the Oxus River and back down through Persia, Mesopotamia,
and Asia Minor to the Balkans, and then back across or around the Black
Sea through the Caucusus region and south through Arabia into Egypt
and then west to Morocco, and always find himself in a generally familiar
world permeated by a single coherent civilization-in much the same way
that a modern traveler roaming from San Francisco to London and all
across Europe would find himself in a generally familiar civilization with a
German flavor here, a Swedish flavor there, a Spanish, British, or Dutch
flavor somewhere else.
Yes, that seventeenth-century traveler through the Muslim world would
encounter diverse local customs and come across a variety of languages,
and yes, he would cross borders and present paperwork to officials work-
ing for different sovereign powers, but everywhere he went, he would find
certain common elements as well.
In all three of the great Muslim empires and their satellite regions, for
example, he would find that Turks generally held political and military
power. (Even in Safavid Persia, the ruling family was actually ethnically