Celebrate Diversity

Twenty-one years ago, as a backpacker on my first trip to India, I climbed the great flight of steps leading to the Friday Mosque at Fatehpur Sikri. At the top, over the mosque's great arched gateway, I saw a calligraphic panel in Arabic that read: Jesus, son of Mary (on whom be peace) said the world is a bridge; pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day may hope for eternity; but the world endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen. The inscription was totally unfamiliar. It certainly sounded like the sort of thing Jesus might have said, but did he really say the world is like a bridge? And why would a Muslim ruler want to place an apparently Christian quotation over the entrance to the main mosque in his capital city?Akbar, the 16th century Mughal Emperor who built both the city and mosque, was a most intriguing figure. Not only did he establish the Mughal Empire from the fragile conquests bequeathed to him by his father and grandfather, he was also an aesthete, a philosopher and a tolerant connoisseur of religions, whose rule succeeded as much through tact and conciliation as by war. His method, which he came to from religious conviction as well as realpolitik, was to make Mughal rule acceptable to the empire's overwhelmingly non-Muslim population. Soon after beginning work on his new capital city, Akbar issued an edict of universal toleration, and forbade forcible conversion to Islam. He ordered the translation of Sanskrit classics into Persian, and promoted Hindus at all levels of the administration, even entrusting his army to his former enemy, the Jaipur ruler Raja Man Singh.I was reminded of all this when I came across Akbar in the pages of The Argumentative Indian, a remarkable new collection of essays by the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Sen credits Akbar with laying a major part of the foundations of modern Indian secularism and democracy. He takes issue with the commonplace that the West is the ultimate origin of the ideas of religious freedom and democracy, arguing that the East has its own venerable traditions of public participation in decision making, of government by discussion, and of religious tolerance. Indeed, at the same time that most of Catholic Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was being burned in Rome for heresy, Akbar was declaring that no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.Akbar built Fatehpur Sikri to translate his spiritual ideas into stone. He consciously combined Hindu and Muslim elements in a syncretic fusion style, and designed the buildings so as to turn them into a philosophical laboratory for spiritual inquiry. Holy men from all India's different religions were invited to the city to make their case, including a party of Portuguese Jesuit fathers from Goa and a group of Hindu atheists. In this way, Akbar set up perhaps the earliest known multireligious discussion group, in which representatives of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Jews and Parsis came together to talk about in what way and why they differed and how they could live together.The room where these debates took place, the diwan-i-khas, still existsintact. At the center stands a decorated pillar on which rests a round platform; from it four walkways branch out to the corners of the building, where there are four smaller platforms. Akbar would sit on silken cushions at the center, as holy men of different faiths knelt at the ends of the walkways discussing their beliefs.Why should we care today about what a Mughal Emperor thought and did 450 years ago? On the surface, Asia appears to be hurtling toward a collective future of prosperity and social and political maturity. Yet, in many ways, the region remains as tribal as ever, haunted by past divisions and suspicions. A nuclearized North Korea has emerged as a clear and present danger, while the face-off between Chinese and Japanese nationalists has the potential to launch a new cold war. In southern Thailand, Buddhists and Muslims alike are under the gun, as are minorities in Burma and Laos. South Asian giants India and Pakistan may be mending fences, but stubborn religious and ethnic animosities are never far from eruption. Scattered across the region are small but deadly assortments of Islamist militants whose narrow and perverse interpretation of the Koran menaces anyone who doesn't abide by it.All of which suggests that Akbar's message of unity through diversity needs to be heeded more than ever. He demonstrated that tolerance and open public debate are universal traditions, as deeply rooted in the East as in the West. At this present moment in Asia's history, with so much to gain, yet with so much threatening those hopes, this is a vital insightand one that should never be forgotten.William Dalrymple's most recent book, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, won the Wolfson Prize for History