Kabir belonged to a family of julahas, weavers, a Muslim community of low status in fifteenth century Varanasi, and the loom is everywhere in his verse: the cloth God wove with such care, the warp and weft of the breath, the body worn out like a garment. His forms are short and memorable by design, the two line doha and the sung pad, made to be carried in the head rather than written down.
Their content is an attack, delivered with contempt in both directions. He asks the Brahmin, if you were born by a different route from everyone else, why the ordinary rules do not apply to you. He asks whether God is deaf, that the mullah must climb the minaret and shout. He is scathing about pilgrimage, about ritual bathing, about vegetarian piety combined with cruelty, about rosaries and about learning. If washing in water gained liberation, he says, the frogs would have got there first.
What he puts in their place is a formless God, without attributes and without incarnation, whom he calls Ram, meaning explicitly not the prince of the epic but the name itself as the only available handle. That position, nirguna devotion, ties him to the sant tradition of northern India, and the discipline it demands is interior, immediate, available to a weaver, and impossible to institutionalise, which is a difficulty his followers inherited.