Dārā Shikōh · دارا شکوہ

The Mughal crown prince who believed the Upanishads and the Qur'an were saying the same thing, and set out to prove it. He gathered pandits from Benares to Delhi and, in 1656–57, translated fifty Upanishads into Persian as the Sirr-i-Akbar, "The Greatest Secret" — arguing in his preface that this was the "hidden book" the Qur'an itself alludes to. He had already written the Majma-ul-Baḥrain, "The Confluence of the Two Seas," setting Sufi and Vedāntic terms side by side. In 1659 his brother Aurangzeb had him executed, with the charge of apostasy hung on exactly this work. The comparative impulse this whole annex is built on has, in his case, a documented body count — which is worth remembering on a bench where the stakes usually feel academic.