Perspective on the Muslim World

As the news comes in today it is easy to become discouraged - or even hateful - when thinking about the Muslim world: mosque bombings, death squads, rage and intolerance everywhere. An unsympathetic observer might think that Islam somehow is to blame. If that were true, then it would be true whenever and wherever there was Islam.

So let's look at one episode in the vast story of Islam, as recounted in William Dalrymple's review of Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity in the New York Review of Books.

At the end of the sixteenth century the Mughal Emperor Akbar built a new capital, Fatehpur Sikri. There he delighted in listening to the debates of the holy men and scholars of different faiths.

Holy men from all of India's different religions were invited to the city to make the case for their particular understanding of the metaphysical. In this way Akbar set up the earliest know multireligious discussion group, where representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shia as well as Sufi), Hindus (both Shaivite and Vaishnavite), Christians, Jains, Jews, and Zoroastrian Parsees came together to discuss where and why they differed, and how they could live together. There was also a party of atheists represented in the discussion...

[This] astonished many more orthodox Muslim contemporaries such as the Sheikh
Nur al-Haqq: "Learned men from Khorasan and Iraq and Transoxiana and India, both doctors and theologians, Sh'ia and Sunnis, Christians, philosophers and Brahmins all assembled together at the sublime court . . . Here they discussed the
rational and traditional methods of discourse, travel, and histories as well as each other's prophecies. They widened the circle of debate and each attempted to prove his own claim and desired the propagation of his school. Outstanding thinkers appeared . . . The lofty Lord [Akbar] declared before the people: 'Oh learned ones! Our purpose is to seek the truth . . . "