In 1575 the Mughal emperor Akbar built a House of Worship, the Ibadat Khana, at his new capital of Fatehpur Sikri, initially to host Thursday evening debates among Muslim scholars of different schools. As the debates grew more acrimonious, and as reports of their pettiness reached him, Akbar widened participation far beyond Islam, inviting Hindu pandits, Jain monks, the Zoroastrian priest Dastur Meherji Rana, and from 1580 a delegation of Jesuit missionaries sent from Portuguese Goa. Listening to competing and often mutually contemptuous claims to exclusive religious truth left Akbar sceptical of any single clerical authority, Muslim included. In 1579 a circle of religious scholars, under pressure from the emperor, signed a mahzar, a formal legal declaration acknowledging Akbar's right, as a just Muslim ruler, to choose among competing interpretations of Islamic law when scholars disagreed, effectively placing him above the ulema on contested points.
Building on this authority, Akbar formally founded Din i Ilahi, the Divine Faith, in 1582, as a personal order of initiated disciples, chelas, bound by loyalty and a distinctive greeting rather than by any inherited scripture, closing the Ibadat Khana's public debates in favour of a smaller, more disciplined court institution centred on the emperor himself.