Din-i-Ilahi

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.

Din i Ilahi had no scripture, no priesthood and no fixed places of worship of its own. Its central teaching was sulh i kul, universal peace or tolerance among faiths, expressed through a broadly monotheistic reverence that borrowed the sun and fire veneration of Zoroastrianism, dietary restrictions echoing Jain and Hindu practice, and an initiation greeting in which a disciple offered Allahu Akbar, God is great, and the emperor, or his representative, replied Jalla Jalaluhu, may his glory be glorified, a phrase that also doubled as wordplay on Akbar's own name. Membership was small and largely confined to court nobles; contemporary estimates run to a few thousand at most, and the hostile chronicler Abd al Qadir Badauni, who regarded the whole project as apostasy from Islam, gives figures smaller still.

Modern historians are divided on how to read the order. Badauni's account, the most detailed contemporary source, frames it as a deliberate new religion designed to elevate Akbar above all existing faiths, while many later historians read it instead as a personal ethical discipleship for loyal courtiers, an instrument of political cohesion in a religiously diverse empire rather than a missionary religion seeking converts. Whichever reading is preferred, Din i Ilahi did not outlive its founder. Akbar's son and successor Jahangir showed no interest in continuing it, and within a generation of Akbar's death in 1605 the order had ceased to exist as an organised following, leaving behind no temples, no surviving community and no scripture of its own.