What the Debates Produced, and Who Left Disappointed

No single tradition won the Ibadat Khana. The Jesuit mission under Rodolfo Acquaviva had come from Goa hoping the exercise would end in Akbar's conversion to Catholicism, and left after failing to secure it, though Jesuit accounts of the Mughal court remain one of the most detailed outside sources on how the debates were conducted. What the sessions produced instead was Akbar's own synthesis: a conviction, formalised as sulh-i-kul, universal peace among faiths, that every tradition present had grasped some genuine portion of truth and that state power should not be lent to any one of their exclusive claims.

Around 1582 that conviction took organisational form in the Din-i-Ilahi, a small discipleship centred on personal loyalty to Akbar rather than on a rival scripture or clergy, drawing at most a few thousand courtiers into its ranks before Akbar's death in 1605 and his successors' reversal of the policy. Whether the Ibadat Khana debates and the order that followed amount to Akbar founding a new religion or devising a court ethical discipline is a live historiographical question, treated separately in this atlas under sulh-i-kul.