Author: Someone named rudrAgni on social media.
Summary
My position on this whole thing is that Akbar, was an individual born with a tremendous vital & spiritual force, but being so full of life and power, he felt a tremendous dissatisfaction with the religious tradition that he was born in, as it was a religion that suppresses life instead of nurturing it.
Whether it be destruction of beautiful idols & temples, that were created with skill, patience & hardwork, or killing and raping more accomplished and more beautiful people than oneself, Islam +++(he encountered)+++ is full of resentment against the healthy. It’s a mental disease that seeks to infect the mentally sane out of nothing but jealousy.
Akbar found his spiritual calling being suppressed by such a disgusting religion of illiterate “highway robbers” from Arabia. And tried to break free off it by using his intellect.
In the end, he couldn’t completely break free off the thought patterns of his earlier religion. For eg. He didn’t realise that though Pigs are considered disgusting creatures (especially in Islam), the boar; the Varaha, is a symbol of masculinity not just in India but in the whole Indo-European realm, and for that His form is worthy of worship, because it is superior to humans.
He (possibly) also rejected the idea of plurality of the self-existent ‘one’, but still continued to worship the sun & stars. A testament to this is Abul Fazl & his older brother, Faizi, both admitting to having engaged in pantheism/ polytheism.
In the end all we can say is that, he accomplished his task, in that he stopped being resentful (iconoclastic, genocidal, or lustful of wives of others), and as such, overcame Islam as an individual.
During the course of his reign he banned Jizya, pilgrimage tax, banned cow slaughter, included some Hindus into the higher ranks of his nobility, took advice from Brahmins, ordered translation of Indian histories, recited Gayatri Mantra thrice a day, tried to become a complete vegetarian (but failed), tried to convert Muslim nobility to vegetarianism, included many Hindu traditions in his nobility, took up Hindu style of dressing & grooming (got rid of his beard). Though, Din-i-Illahi didn’t last long after his death some of the etiquettes he started lasted till the end of the Mughal dynasty.
Suppression of Islamists
Badauni records that, “not a trace of Islam was left in him [Akbar] and everything was turned topsy turvy” (MT, II, 262). Akbar, according to him, had started to regard the Islamic religion and all its doctrines as a senseless invention of some poor Arab highway robbers in but recent times. And as a result Islam allegedly became practically moribund in Akbar’s reign.
It was all due, if not to his apotheosis of “reason,” then to the pernicious influence of “Hindu wretches” and “Hinduizing Muslims” on the ignorant emperor’s mind; and it was made worse by the fact that villainously irreligious ulama pronounced the emperor blameless even while he heaped unrestrained insults upon the Prophet. Soon after the revocation of the charity lands, in fact, renowned scholars of Islam had vanished from the cities of India; a new generation appeared which neglected prayer, and abandoned madrasas and mosques.
According to Badauni, not every mulla acquiesced; some issued responses (fatwas) on the duty of rebellion against the irreligious emperor, and engaged in desperate struggles. But Akbar made sure that such mullas, and anyone whom he even suspected of dissent, were banished to the remotest parts of the empire, such as Bhakkar in Sind and similar places in Bengal. Numerous mullas, shaykhs, Sufis and fakirs were also deported to Qandahar and there exchanged for Turkish colts. It was in this way that the ulama of Lahore were scattered,and that the great shaykhs of Jaunpur with their wives and families were sent to Ajmer, where they languished in poverty or died. The grandson of Khwaja Mu’in ad-Din himself was banished to Bhakkar when he failed to make his proper obeisance to Akbar after returning from Mecca, and with the approach of the end of the first millennium the emperor abandoned all remaining respect for shaykhs and ulama, annulling the statutes and ordinances of Islam.
“Hindu ascetics and Barhmans… suppress all other learned men in their treatises on morals and on physical and religious sciences, and since they attain a high degree of knowledge of the future and of spiritual power and human perfection, they managed to bring proofs based on reason and testimony for the truth of their own religion and falsity of other faiths, and inculcated their doctrines so firmly that no man, by expressing his doubts, could raise a doubt in pAdishAh, even though the mountains should crumble to dust or the heavens be torn asunder.” - Badauni