Guru Nanak Founds Sikhism
Also called: Founding of Sikhism
Nanak of the Punjab taught a faith in one God that went beyond the forms of both Hinduism and Islam, founding Sikhism. It rejected caste and proclaimed equality.
Dey.sandip · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source
Nanak was born into a Hindu family in 1469 at Talwandi in the Punjab (modern Nankana Sahib, Pakistan). Around 1500, at a river near Sultanpur, he is said to have had a revelation and declared, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” He travelled widely in India and western Asia, teaching inward devotion to the one God and criticising idol worship and caste discrimination. He is seen as influenced both by Hindu bhakti devotion and by Islamic Sufism.
Ten Gurus led the community in turn. The fifth, Arjan, built the Golden Temple at Amritsar and compiled the scripture, the Adi Granth, but was executed under the Mughal emperor Jahangir. Facing Aurangzeb’s persecution, the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, created the armed brotherhood of the Khalsa in 1699, and in the early 19th century the Sikhs founded a kingdom in the Punjab.