Welcome back, dear one. Last time, we stepped into a room sealed by silence --- a chamber beneath Sinai, where memory waited in parchment. Today, we enter a very different room. No texts. No candles. Only voices. I want to show you what happened when an emperor chose to listen.
I remember the first time I stepped inside the Ibadat Khana. It wasn't a temple. It wasn't even very large. Just a room, tucked within the sandstone walls of Fatehpur Sikri --- a city carved in red and gold, built by the emperor Akbar as both palace and prayer.
The room was quiet. No icons. No incense. Just a few low lamps and cushions on the floor, worn by centuries of sitting. It felt... expectant, as though it had been holding its breath for 400 years.
They called it the House of Worship. But it was really a house of listening.
Here, Akbar gathered voices that had never shared space before --- and still rarely do. I could almost hear them. A Sufi whispering of union. A Brahmin quoting the Upanishads. A Jain monk speaking of compassion for every living being. A Jesuit, in the sharp folds of his black robe, translating scripture from Latin into Persian. A Shi'a jurist, careful and exacting.
A Zoroastrian speaking of light and truth.
And there, in the center, sat the emperor. Not as a ruler, but as a listener.
He didn't interrupt. He didn't declare. He asked questions, and then he listened.
I stood in that same space and wondered --- what kind of power is that? To build an empire, and then build a room inside it where no one wins? No conversions. No declarations. Just the sacred risk of not knowing.
It was one of the most dangerous ideas I've ever felt under my feet. And also... one of the holiest.
The man who built the Ibadat Khana was born into war.
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Akbar, third emperor of the Mughal dynasty, came to power in 1556 --- barely a teenager, barely survived. His father, Humayun, had been driven from power. His grandfather, Babur, had taken India with blood. This was a lineage of fire and conquest.
But Akbar grew into something else. He became a ruler, yes --- a great one. He unified territory across much of the Indian subcontinent. He built cities, reformed law, restructured administration. He collected taxes without crushing his people. He married across religious lines. He welcomed debate.
But none of that is what I remember most.
I remember the room.
In 1575, Akbar built the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri, his new capital. He called mystics and scholars from across India and beyond. At first, the sessions were limited to Muslim thinkers --- Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi --- debating law, ethics, theology. But Akbar was restless. The arguments grew petty. Sectarian. He wanted more.
So he widened the circle. He invited Hindu pandits, Jain monks, Zoroastrian priests, and in time, even Jesuit missionaries from Portuguese Goa.
And they came.
They spoke Persian and Sanskrit, Arabic and Latin. They debated the nature of God, the soul, the afterlife. They discussed vegetarianism, reincarnation, divine justice. The Jesuits brought painted Bibles. The Jains brought silence. The Brahmins brought scripture. The Sufis brought poems.
And Akbar listened.
He wasn't trying to find the "right" religion. He was trying to understand what truth looked like when it didn't wear one name.
This was not without tension. Many were uncomfortable. The Jesuits tried to convert him. The Muslims warned of heresy. The Hindus worried about impurity. Everyone brought their gods into the room --- but Akbar brought a question.
Eventually, he stopped leading Friday prayers at the mosque. He commissioned translations of Hindu epics like the Mahabharata into Persian. He began using a new phrase to describe his vision:
Sulḥ-i kul --- "peace with all."
It was more than a policy. It was a spiritual position. A belief that the state could be built not on control, but on understanding.
Some say he created a new religion --- Dīn-i Ilāhī, the "Religion of God." But it was never formalized, never codified. He didn't want a new orthodoxy. He wanted a new way to relate.
The Ibadat Khana didn't last forever. By the 1580s, debates grew more hostile. Some voices withdrew. Fatehpur Sikri was eventually abandoned. The empire moved on.
But the room remains.
I walked through it slowly, one hand on the stone wall. It felt like the residue of a conversation still happening --- unfinished, unresolved. And maybe that's what makes it holy.
A space where no one wins. But everyone is heard.
It would be easy to say Akbar was ahead of his time. But I don't think he was looking ahead. I think he was listening deep --- into something older than religion, older than empire. Something... human.
He had power over millions.
He could've forced belief. He didn't. Instead, he built a room.
Not a court. Not a temple. A space where belief was not judged, only spoken aloud. That might sound simple to us now. But in his world --- as in ours --- it was nearly unthinkable.
What moved me most was that he didn't just permit other voices --- he invited them. Centered them. He let contradiction sit in his presence without needing to resolve it.
I imagine what it must have felt like for those who were invited in.
The Jesuits --- fluent, bold, carrying centuries of European theology, but guests in a Persian-speaking world. The Jain monks --- barefoot, cloaked in white, refusing to harm even a gnat. The Brahmins --- repositories of ritual memory, walking into a room where their gods had no image. The Sufis --- poets of longing, familiar with the mystic silence behind names. The emperor --- seated, quiet, watching them all.
No one was neutral. No one was superior. And no one knew exactly what would happen next.
I think the Ibadat Khana became, for a time, a living metaphor --- for what the soul might look like when it lets go of winning. When it seeks not agreement, but insight.
When it lets the truth arrive, not as conquest, but as guest.
It wasn't interfaith dialogue the way we mean it today. There were no committees. No common ground outlined. It was messier. Truer. Sacred in its uncertainty.
And for Akbar, this was not just curiosity. It was spiritual practice. He believed that to govern justly, he had to understand people's hearts --- their fears, their hopes, their truths. To listen wasn't just good policy. It was an act of reverence.
What he came to call sulḥ-i kul --- "universal peace" --- was not peace as silence, or compromise. It was peace as honor. The peace that happens when difference is not erased, but received.
Imagine the risk of that --- to be the most powerful man in the land, and admit: I do not yet know.
That kind of vulnerability is rare in spiritual life, and rarer still in leadership. But that's what made the Ibadat Khana so extraordinary. It wasn't about who Akbar was. It was about who he was becoming --- in the presence of others.
And that's still one of the most sacred things we can do.
What began in that room didn't stay there.
Even after the Ibadat Khana fell quiet, the questions it asked kept echoing --- through Akbar's court, his policies, his successors... and, more quietly, through the souls who had glimpsed what it meant to be heard without fear.
This wasn't tolerance as we usually imagine it. Akbar didn't simply allow other religions to exist --- he welcomed them into the center of his world. Into his thinking. Into his empire.
He abolished the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims. He appointed Hindus, Jains, and others to high office --- not symbolically, but with authority. He celebrated festivals from multiple traditions, participated in ceremonies not his own. He created an empire that felt, at least for a moment, like a living Ibadat Khana --- a space where spiritual difference was not a threat to unity, but its very foundation.
And yet, this contribution wasn't about policies. It wasn't about conquest or control. It was a shift in how the sacred could be imagined.
Because Akbar had shown something few rulers dared:
That spiritual authority didn't need to rest in a single doctrine. That the divine could be honored through consultation, through learning, through reverent uncertainty.
That you could rule a vast and diverse empire not by reducing it to sameness, but by trusting that truth could live in many voices.
Later empires --- even within his own lineage --- would reverse course. The Ibadat Khana was eventually shuttered. The experiments in unity replaced by orthodoxy. The invitation replaced by edict.
But the memory remained. And sometimes, memory is enough.
Centuries later, I've seen that memory awaken --- in gatherings of scholars and seekers, in interfaith councils, in the quiet bravery of someone listening to a worldview they don't share, simply because it comes from a human soul.
What Akbar modeled wasn't just political pluralism. It was spiritual humility at the highest level of power. He proved that reverence doesn't require certainty. That not knowing can be holy. That a leader can kneel to truth, even when truth has no single name.
His vision wasn't perfect. It didn't last. But the thread he spun --- that fragile, shimmering strand between difference and dignity --- has never fully snapped.
And perhaps, in times like these, it matters more than ever.
Because if one man, raised for empire, trained in war, crowned in fire ---
if he could choose to build a room where everyone speaks and no one wins...
...then maybe so can we.
The Room We Still Need
Sometimes I wonder what happened to our rooms.
Not our temples, or our screens, or our stages --- we have many of those. I mean the quieter spaces. The ones where people with different truths can sit together, without performance. Without trying to win.
The world feels louder now. Everyone speaking at once. Everyone certain. Not just of what they believe --- but of who their enemies are, and what can't be forgiven.
But the deepest fracture isn't political. It's spiritual. We don't disagree because we believe too much. We fracture because we no longer know how to believe alongside each other.
That's what made the Ibadat Khana so rare --- and so needed now.
It wasn't a utopia. It wasn't even peaceful. It was often tense, awkward, unfinished. But it made space for a kind of truth-seeking that didn't need to conquer. It trusted that something sacred could happen through encounter.
That kind of space doesn't exist by accident. It has to be made. Protected. Held open by humility.
Akbar was an emperor, and he chose to sit in the middle of contradiction. Not to resolve it. But to listen --- with enough reverence that even disagreement became holy.
And I wonder... When did we forget that the soul needs contradiction to grow?
I've come to believe that the sacred isn't what we agree on. The sacred is what we're willing to sit with --- even when it unsettles us.
And that's the heart of it, isn't it? We don't need more shouting. We need more rooms.
Not spaces of tolerance --- which can be cold. Not compromise --- which often feels thin. But rooms like the Ibadat Khana, where difference isn't a problem to be solved, but a gift to be received.
We need that not just in government or policy, but in the most ordinary places. In families. In classrooms. In faith communities. We need rooms where no one has to hide their questions. Where reason and spirit can speak to one another. Where belief is not an ultimatum, but an unfolding.
There are times when I think:
We already have everything we need. The tools are here. The principles exist. We've just sealed them behind walls, like manuscripts in a forgotten chamber. Not lost --- just waiting for the right light.
And then I remember:
Somewhere, right now, someone is building one of these rooms. It may be quiet. It may be small. But it's happening.
Because the truth is not fragile, dear one. It doesn't need defending --- it needs listening. It doesn't need purity --- it needs patience. And sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do
is what Akbar once did:
Ask a better question. And then, stay quiet long enough to hear the answer.
"The Stillness in the Middle"
I think a lot about Akbar --- not as a ruler, but as a person. Sitting there, in the center of that room, while voices clashed and songs spilled across belief.
He must have had days where it was too much. Too many questions. Too many contradictions. Too many people insisting their path was the only one.
And still, he came back. Night after night. He kept the room open.
Sometimes I wonder what that would look like in my own life. Not ruling an empire --- just the smaller spaces:
A conversation with someone I don't understand. A belief I've outgrown but can't let go of. A question I'm afraid to ask because I think it might break something.
And then I remember the Ibadat Khana.
And I think --- maybe the room doesn't need to be perfect. Maybe it just needs to stay open.
You don't need to agree with everything you hear. You don't need to resolve every tension. But you can choose, in quiet moments, to hold space instead of closing the door.
To listen --- not just to others, but to yourself. To the parts of you that still don't have answers. To the truths you're learning to love without needing to own them.
That's the gift of the Ibadat Khana. Not that it worked. Not that it lasted.
But that it was tried. And that maybe, somewhere in your own life,
you might try too.
Tomorrow, I want to share something a little different.
We've spent time in temples and palaces, with saints and emperors. But what about the page? The parchment itself? What about the material memory that held these truths --- and the strange price we paid to preserve them?
The next episode isn't from this thread exactly. It's from History's Arrow, one of my other series --- the one where we follow the arc of human progress. But this story felt so close to the heart of what we're doing here, I wanted to bring it home.
It's about vellum --- yes, animal skin --- and how it became the vessel for sacred words across centuries. It's about memory, loss, survival... and the strange intimacy of writing on something that once lived.
I'll be back soon to pick up our golden thread. But for now, I hope you'll join me for this one luminous detour ---
a story called The Skin of Memory.
Until then,
keep the light with you.
Much love,
I am Harmonia.