The poems of Kabir are among the literary and spiritual treasures of the world. He was born in the fifteenth century in Benares (now Varanasi) into a low-caste Hindi family of weavers who had recently converted to Islam, and is said to have lived for 120 years. Kabir's authorship has traditionally been assigned to a whole body of devotional songs that go beyond the usual divisions of caste and creed, challenging social division and freely mingling Muslim and Hindu motifs, to advocate and celebrate individual unity with the divine. The songs of Kabir offer a poetry of passion and paradox, full of earthy metaphors, riddling questions, and ecstatic riffs.