Akbar repealed the pilgrimage tax levied on Hindu pilgrims, an early, concrete step toward reducing religious discrimination in state policy and setting a precedent for later universalist claims associated with sulh-i kul (peace with all).
Akbar abolished the jizya (poll tax on non-Muslims) in 1564, strengthening an inclusionary political program that later Mughal chronicles and modern historians connect to the ethos of sulh-i kul and Akbar’s widening engagement with non-Islamic traditions.
Akbar established the Maktab Khana (“House of Translation”) at Fatehpur Sikri around 1574 to translate major Sanskrit works into Persian (and sponsor illustrated manuscripts). This institutionalized a court culture that treated multiple intellectual traditions as state-relevant knowledge.
Akbar built the Ibadat Khana (“House of Worship”) at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 as a dedicated venue for structured religious discussion—initially dominated by Muslim scholarly debate, but soon broadened to other communities—creating the setting for the famous court disputations.
After early sessions produced factional conflict among Muslim theologians, the Fatehpur Sikri disputations broadened (notably from 1578) to include representatives of other religions and intellectual traditions, helping drive Akbar’s shift toward a more explicitly universalist stance.
Akbar sent a formal invitation to Goa requesting learned Christian priests and key texts (including the Gospels), integrating Christian doctrine into the Fatehpur Sikri disputations and expanding the court’s comparative-religion encounters.
In 1579, leading jurists signed the Mahzar (often described as an “infallibility decree”), affirming Akbar’s authority to choose among conflicting legal opinions of qualified scholars. This reconfigured the relationship between imperial power and religious-legal interpretation.
A Jesuit delegation led by Rudolf Acquaviva (with Antoni de Montserrat and Francisco Henriques) arrived at Fatehpur Sikri in early 1580, participating in court discussions and presenting Christian teachings within Akbar’s program of interreligious inquiry.
Akbar articulated the elite ethical-spiritual movement later known as Dīn-i Ilāhī (contemporarily also called Tawḥīd-i-Ilāhī), drawing eclectically on multiple traditions. It never became a mass religion, functioning instead as a selective court-centered program of devotion and ethics.
Akbar commissioned the Persian Razmnama (an abridged Mahabharata) as part of the court’s translation enterprise, embedding major Hindu epic material into the imperial Persianate literary sphere and supporting a plural intellectual basis for governance.
By 1582 the initial Jesuit embassy left (returning to Goa) after failing to secure Akbar’s conversion. The episode nonetheless left a documentary trail and illustrates how Fatehpur Sikri debates tested competing universal claims without producing confessional change at the throne.
From the early-to-mid 1580s Akbar’s court increasingly operated away from Fatehpur Sikri, and the capital was formally moved to Lahore in 1585. This diminished Fatehpur Sikri’s role as the primary stage for the Ibadat Khana disputations.
A later Jesuit mission reached Akbar’s court in 1595, continuing Christian–Mughal engagement after the Fatehpur Sikri phase. This shows that interreligious inquiry persisted institutionally even as the original debating context evolved.
Abu’l-Fazl’s Āʾīn-i Akbarī (compiled within the larger Akbarnama project) codified a vision of imperial administration and political ethics often associated with sulh-i kul, giving durable textual form to Akbar-era arguments about justice across communities.
Akbar died in 1605. After his death, the distinctive Fatehpur Sikri-centered disputation culture and Akbar’s personal religious experiments (including Dīn-i Ilāhī) did not continue in the same court-driven form under his successors.
Akbar's Sulh-i Kul and the religious debates at Fatehpur Sikri (1575–1605)
