Akbar

Akbar was born in 1542 at Umerkot in Sindh, while his father Humayun was a king in flight, and inherited a fragile throne at thirteen. By his thirties he had made the Mughal state master of northern India; what he did next has fascinated historians ever since. In 1575 he built the Ibadat Khana, the House of Worship, at his new capital of Fatehpur Sikri, and began staging religious debate, first among Muslim scholars, whose quarrels disappointed him, then, from 1578, among everyone he could summon: Sunni and Shia divines, Hindu pandits, Jain monks, Parsi priests, and Jesuit fathers from Goa who arrived hoping to baptize an emperor and left with respectful frustration.

The debates changed the debater. Akbar withdrew from the orthodox ulama, took spiritual direction of his court into his own hands with the mahzar of 1579, a declaration giving the emperor authority to decide among interpretations of law, and framed his rule by sulh-i-kul, universal peace, under which he had already abolished the jizya tax on non-Muslims and the tax on Hindu pilgrims. Jain influence moderated his hunting and brought slaughter bans on Jain holy days; Zoroastrian practice touched his reverence for fire and the sun. S. A. A. Rizvi's standard study traces how these currents fed the final experiment, the Din-i-Ilahi, and how bitterly the orthodox chronicler Badauni recorded every step of it.

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.