A House Built for One Argument, Widened to Many

The Ibadat Khana opened in 1575 as a fairly ordinary instrument of a pious Muslim ruler, a hall at Fatehpur Sikri where Sunni ulema and Sufi shaikhs could argue points of doctrine and law under the emperor's eye. What changed its character was Akbar's own reaction to what he heard there: the theologians, in his account and in the accounts of court chroniclers such as Abu'l-Fazl, argued past each other and accused one another of heresy more readily than they resolved anything, and by 1578 Akbar had begun inviting figures the original hall was never built for, Shia scholars, Hindu pandits versed in Vedanta, Jain ascetics under the monk Hiravijaya Suri, Zoroastrian dasturs from the Parsi community, and Jesuit priests from the Portuguese colony at Goa from 1580. Each tradition was asked to make its case in the emperor's presence, and Akbar increasingly presided less as a Muslim sovereign hearing Muslim disputants than as a ruler auditioning the comparative claims of every faith practised in his empire.