The Ibadat Khana, the house of worship, was built about 1575 for religious discussion on Thursday nights, and at first only Sunni scholars were admitted. Their disputes became so acrimonious that Akbar opened the sessions in 1578 to Shias, Sufis, Brahmins, Jain teachers, Zoroastrian priests, materialists and, from 1580, Jesuit missionaries invited from Goa.
The Jesuits left detailed letters; the visit of the Jain teacher Hiravijaya Suri produced imperial orders restricting animal slaughter on certain days; and the emperor gave up hunting and later meat. In 1579 a document signed by the leading jurists recognised Akbar's authority to decide between conflicting legal opinions, which his critics read as a claim to religious supremacy and his defenders as a device of judicial arbitration. Out of the sessions came what later writers called the Din-i-Ilahi, better described as a small circle of personal disciples bound to the emperor by a rule of conduct than as a religion with a doctrine or a congregation, and it did not outlive him. Two contemporaries describe all of this and they disagree completely. Abul Fazl presents an enlightened sovereign rising above sectarian narrowness, and Badauni, who was present and hostile, presents an apostasy. The atlas records both and treats neither as a neutral witness.