The weaver-poet traditionally remembered as a low-status julaha of Benares, dated to the 15th century, who became the most piercing voice of North India's sant tradition of devotion to a God without form. By tradition raised in a Muslim weaver family in a holy Hindu city, he mocked the externals of both religions in short, blunt, vernacular verses that have been claimed since by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike. He wrote nothing down; his sayings survive in variant, contested streams, including the Sikh scripture, which makes the recovery of the historical Kabir genuinely uncertain.
A weaver of Benares sat at his loom and ridiculed the city's holiest men. He laughed at the Brahmin's pride of birth and his bathing in the Ganges, and at the Muslim's call to prayer and his hunger for Mecca. In one verse, as it is often translated, he asks: "If God be within the mosque, then to whom does this world belong?" By tradition he was raised a Muslim and worked in a Hindu holy city, and he refused both labels, insisting the one God lived only in the heart. He wrote nothing down. Yet today Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs each claim Kabir as their own, which is the strangest fate for a man who scorned every name they fight over.