While Giordano Bruno, Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, was burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600, Akbar was debuting his reforms on religious tolerance in India.
Akbar a social science genius slammed child marriage at a time when social convention permeated it; disparaged Islam’s giving the bigger inheritance to males arguing that females are weaker, and frowned upon Hindus for not allowing widows to remarry.
Secular features that the 1590s Akbar championed for had found roots in India’s constitution in 1947 after gaining independence from the British rule; not forgetting that India now is the world’s largest democracy, whom many egg on its soft power in comparison to the rising power counterpart China that lacks it. It is also soft power that a democracy can produce more so than a dogmatic, didactic society.
According to Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, it is Akbar who paid attention to inter-community relations and for communal peace, and the one who arranged for systematic dialogues in his capital city of Agra between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews and others, even including agnostic and atheists