Akbar, the third Mughal emperor, ruled a subcontinent in which his own Sunni Islam belonged to a small fraction of his subjects, and he built an unusually deliberate religious policy around that fact. In 1575 he opened the Ibadat Khana, a hall for religious debate at his new capital Fatehpur Sikri, first among Muslim scholars and then, as the debates grew heated and inconclusive, opened to Hindu pandits, Jain monks, Zoroastrian priests, and the Jesuit missionaries who had reached his court from Portuguese Goa.
Out of these debates Akbar drew Din-i-Ilahi, a court order of religious discipline rather than a rival religion meant for the wider population, combining elements of the traditions he had heard argued in front of him: a monotheism styled around light and the sun, vegetarianism drawn from Jain and Hindu practice, and a personal loyalty to the emperor himself as its central discipline. Membership never spread past a small circle of courtiers, and the order did not survive Akbar's death, but the debates that produced it left a lasting mark on Mughal policy. Akbar abolished the jizya, the poll tax non-Muslims paid under Islamic law, and ended a tax on Hindu pilgrims, moves his own court chronicler Abu'l Fazl recorded as deliberate acts of a ruler governing a majority he did not share a religion with. The reversal of both policies under his great-grandson Aurangzeb, a century later, is usually read against exactly this precedent.