Akbar to the attempt to equalize religious differences as well.
Convinced that religions did not differ from each other in their
innermost essence, he combined what in his opinion were the essential
elements and about the year 1580 founded a new religion, the famous
Dîn i Ilâhi, the "religion of God." This religion recognizes only one
God, a purely spiritual universally efficient being from whom the
human soul is derived and towards which it tends. The ethics of this
religion comprises the high moral requirements of Sufism and Parsism:
complete toleration, equality of rights among all men, purity in
thought, word and deed. The demand of monogamy, too, was added later.
Priests, images and temples,--Akbar would have none of these in his
new religion, but from the Parsees he took the worship of the fire
and of the sun as to him light and its heat seemed the most beautiful
symbol of the divine spirit.[44] He also adopted the holy cord of the
Hindus and wore upon his forehead the colored token customary among
them. In this eclectic manner he accommodated himself in a few
externalities to the different religious communities existing in his
kingdom.
[Footnote 44: M. Elphinstone, 524.]
Doubtless in the foundation of his Dîn i Ilâhi Akbar was not pursuing
merely ideal ends but probably political ones as well, for the
adoption of the new religion signified an increased loyalty to the
Emperor. The novice had to declare himself ready to yield to the
Emperor his property, his life, his honor, and his former faith, and
in reality the adherents of the Dîn i Ilâhi formed a clan of the
truest and most devoted servitors of the Emperor. It may not be
without significance that soon after the establishment of the Dîn i
Ilâhi a new computation of time was introduced which dated from the
accession of Akbar to the throne in 1556.
After the new religion had been in existence perhaps five years the
number of converts began to grow by the thousands but we can say with
certainty that the greater portion of these changed sides not from
conviction but on account of worldly advantage, since they saw that
membership in the new religion was very advantageous to a career in
the service of the state.[45] By far the greatest number of those who
professed the Dîn i Ilâhi observed only the external forms, privately
remaining alien to it.
[Footnote 45: Noer, I, 503.]
[Illustration: MAUSOLEUM OF AKBAR AT SIKANDRA.]
In reality the new religion did not extend outside of Akbar's court
and died out at his death. Hence if failure here can be charged to the
account of the great Emperor, yet this very failure redounds to his
honor. Must it not be counted as a great honor to Akbar that he
considered it possible to win over his people to a spiritual
imageless worship of God? Had he known that the religious requirements
of the masses can only be satisfied by concrete objects of worship and
by miracles (the more startling the better), that a spiritualized
faith can never be the possession of any but a few chosen souls, he
would not have proceeded with the founding of the Dîn i Ilâhi. And
still we cannot call its establishment an absolute failure, for the
spirit of tolerance which flowed out from Akbar's religion
accomplished infinite good and certainly contributed just as much to
lessening the antagonisms in India as did Akbar's social and
industrial reforms.
A man who accomplished such great things and desired to accomplish
greater, deserves a better fortune than was Akbar's towards the end of
life. He had provided for his sons the most careful education, giving
them at the same time Christian and orthodox Mohammedan instructors in
order to lead them in their early years to the attainment of
independent views by means of a comparison between contrasts; but he
was never to have pleasure in his sons. It seems that he lacked the
necessary severity. The two younger boys of this exceedingly temperate
Emperor, Murâd and Daniâl, died of delirium tremens in their youth
even before their father. The oldest son, Selim, later the Emperor
Jehângir, was also a drunkard and was saved from destruction through
this inherited vice of the Timur dynasty only by the wisdom and
determination of his wife. But he remained a wild uncontrolled cruel
man (as different as possible from his father and apparently so by
intention) who took sides with the party of the vanquished Ulemâs and
stepped forth as the restorer of Islam. In frequent open rebellion
against his magnanimous father who was only too ready to pardon him,
he brought upon this father the bitterest sorrow; and especially by
having the trustworthy minister and friend of his father, Abul Fazl,
murdered while on a journey. Very close to Akbar also was the loss of
his old mother to whom he had clung his whole life long with a
touching love and whom he outlived only a short time.
Akbar lost his best friends and his most faithful servants before he
finally succumbed to a very painful abdominal illness, which at the
last changed him also mentally to a very sad extent, and finally
carried him off on the night of the fifteenth of October, 1605. He was
buried at Sikandra near Agra in a splendid mausoleum of enormous
proportions which he himself had caused to be built and which even
to-day stands almost uninjured.
This in short is a picture of the life and activities of the greatest
ruler which the Orient has ever produced. In order to rightly
appreciate Akbar's greatness we must bear in mind that in his empire
he placed all men on an equality without regard to race or religion,
and granted universal freedom of worship at a time when the Jews were
still outlaws in the Occident and many bloody persecutions occurred
from time to time; when in the Occident men were imprisoned, executed
or burnt at the stake for the sake of their faith or their doubts; at
a time when Europe was polluted by the horrors of witch-persecution
and the massacre of St. Bartholemew.[46] Under Akbar's rule India
stood upon a much higher plane of civilization in the sixteenth
century than Europe at the same time.
[Footnote 46: Noer, I, 490 n.]
Germany should be proud that the personality of Akbar who according to
his own words "desired to live at peace with all humanity, with every
creature of God," has so inspired a noble German of princely blood in
the last century that he consecrated the work of his life to the
biography of Akbar. This man is the Prince Friedrich August of
Schleswig-Holstein, Count of Noer, who wandered through the whole of
Northern India on the track of Akbar's activities, and on the basis
of the most careful investigation of sources has given us in his large
two-volumed work the best and most extensive information which has
been written in Europe about the Emperor Akbar. How much his work has
been a labor of love can be recognized at every step in his book but
especially may be seen in a touching letter from Agra written on the
24th of April, 1868, in which he relates that he utilized the early
hours of this day for an excursion to lay a bunch of fresh roses on
Akbar's grave and that no visit to any other grave had ever moved him
so much as this.[47]
[Footnote 47: Noer, II, 564, 572.]
[Illustration]