Akbar Abolishes the Jizya and Opens the Ibadat Khana to All Faiths
The emperor ends the tax on non-Muslims and turns his House of Worship into an interfaith debate hall
Quick facts
- Pilgrimage tax on Hindus ended
- 1563
- Jizya abolished
- 1564
- Ibadat Khana built
- 1575, at Fatehpur Sikri
- Guiding principle
- Sulh-i-kul, "peace with all"
What happened
In 1564 Akbar abolished the jizya, the poll tax that Islamic law levied on non-Muslim subjects, a step the Encyclopaedia Iranica describes as taken primarily for reasons of state. The previous year he had already ended a pilgrimage tax on Hindus. From 1575 he built a meeting house at his new capital, Fatehpur Sikri, called the Ibadat Khana, or House of Worship, where he convened religious scholars for structured debate. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Akbar grew frustrated with the narrow, often bitter arguments of the Muslim clerics who first dominated these sessions, and progressively widened participation to include Shi'ite scholars, Sufi dervishes, and eventually Hindus, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. The experience pushed him toward his personal formula of sulh-i-kul, or peace with all.
Why it matters
Ending the jizya removed the empire's clearest institutional marker of religious inequality and signaled that Akbar meant to rule Muslims and non-Muslims on the same legal footing, a break from most of his predecessors. The Ibadat Khana debates fed directly into the syncretic religious ideas Akbar formalized later in his reign, and the jizya's abolition became the standard against which Aurangzeb's later reimposition of the tax would be measured by contemporaries and historians alike.
How we know
The jizya's abolition and the broadening of the Ibadat Khana debates are documented in Abu'l Fazl's Akbarnama and in the Muntakhab ut-Tawarikh of the more critical court historian Badauni; the Encyclopaedia Iranica's peer-reviewed entry on Akbar synthesizes both primary chronicles.
Sources
- Fritz Lehmann, Encyclopaedia Iranica. AKBAR I · General sourceiranicaonline.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match).
- Fritz Lehmann, Encyclopaedia Iranica. AKBAR I · General sourceiranicaonline.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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