Around 1582 Akbar instituted what the sources call the Din-i-Ilahi, the Religion of God, or Tauhid-i-Ilahi, divine monotheism. Its members, a small circle of courtiers probably numbering in the low thousands at their most and led by intimates such as Abul Fazl, took initiation from the emperor, greeted one another with Allahu Akbar, honored light and the sun, and vowed devotion to the emperor as spiritual guide, in a discipleship graded by how much a member would sacrifice: property, life, honor, religion. It had no scriptures, no priesthood, no public cult and no missionary reach, and it did not survive its founder: Jahangir let it lapse, and Aurangzeb reversed the wider policies it crowned.
What it was remains genuinely argued. The hostile contemporary Badauni presented it as apostasy, a new religion supplanting Islam; colonial era historians often took him at his word. Much modern scholarship, Rizvi prominent in it, reads the Din-i-Ilahi instead as a Sufi style royal discipleship order inside an unorthodox but still Islamic frame, the personal apex of sulh-i-kul rather than a rival faith. The atlas carries the question on the Din-i-Ilahi entry itself as a debated point rather than settling it here. Either way, the experiment made Akbar the rare emperor who answered religious plurality not with enforcement but with an institution of his own devising, and India has argued about him ever since.