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.