The disagreement between historians over sulh-i-kul and the Din-i-Ilahi is not a dispute about what happened so much as about what it should be called. Both camps accept that Akbar convened the Ibadat Khana, abolished the jizya, drew a small circle of courtiers into a personal discipleship around 1582, and that his successors, in particular his great-grandson Aurangzeb, reversed the policy and reasserted a narrower Islamic orthodoxy at court. Where they differ is on the weight the word religion should carry. Vincent Smith's early twentieth century account, written under the assumptions of British colonial historiography, treated the Din-i-Ilahi as a rival faith Akbar set up in competition with Islam, complete with its own greeting formula and rituals of obeisance.
Later historians, S. A. A. Rizvi prominent among them, argue this overstates a phenomenon that never had scripture, congregational worship, or a claim on ordinary subjects, and read it instead as an elite ethical and political fellowship binding perhaps a few thousand courtiers to Akbar personally, closer to a chivalric order than a church. The atlas records both readings because the underlying evidence genuinely supports either description depending on how narrowly religion is defined, and no consensus has settled the question.