Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/156

Rh bear on his Majesty, there grew, gradually as the outline on a stone, the conviction on his heart that there were sensible men in all religions, and abstemious thinkers, and men endowed with miraculous powers, among all nations. If some true knowledge were thus everywhere to be found, why should truth be confined to one religion, or to a creed like Islám, which was comparatively new, and scarcely a thousand years old; why should one sect assert what another denies, and why should one claim a preference without having superiority conferred upon itself?'

Badauní goes on to state that Akbar conferred with Bráhmans and Sumánis, and under their influence accepted the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. There can be no doubt, however, but that the two brothers, Faizí and Abulfazl, like himself born and brought up in the faith of Islám, greatly influenced the direction of his studies on religion. It is necessary to say something regarding two men so illustrious and so influential. They were the sons of a Shaikh of Arab descent, Shaikh Mubárak, whose ancestors settled at Nagar, in Rájpútána. Shaikh Mubárak, a man who had studied the religion of his ancestors to the acquiring of a complete knowledge of every phase of it, who possessed an inquiring mind and a comprehensive genius, and who had progressed in thought as he acquired knowledge, gave his children an education which, grafted on minds apt to receive and to retain knowledge, qualified them to shine in any society. The elder son,