First Link: Jerome Xavier in Mughal India

The origin of the cycle to which Jadid al-Islam's main polemical work belongs can be traced back to India at the turn of the seventeenth century. At this time, Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605) patronised religious scholars from different traditions in a quest to develop a syncretic religion, which would be called dīn-i ilāhī (the divine religion). Scholarship from earlier decades romanticised this project as the apex of tolerance, whereas more recent studies have convincingly highlighted its purely pragmatic nature as a way to deter factionalism in an empire as heterogeneous as Mughal India. Moreover, as Audrey Truschke suggests, through this strategy, Akbar was also able to draw from different sources of knowledge to refute and condemn ideas of which he disapproved. Whatever the case, Christian missionaries saw in these overtures the opportunity to proselytise; with some naively thinking that the Mughal monarch could eventually convert to Christianity. Gil Eanes Pereira, who had been previously stationed in Satgaon in Bengal, was the first priest to be entrusted with the teaching of the Gospels at the Mughal court. However, after a brief period of teaching he suggested to Akbar to seek more specialised instruction. The king then sent out a delegation to Goa, which in 1580 led to the arrival at the court of the Jesuits Rodolfo Acquaviva (d. 1583), António de Monserrate (d. 1600) and Francisco Henriques. For their mission they brought with them a seven-volume Bible in Hebrew, Chaldean, Greek and Latin printed in Antwerp by the famous publisher Christophe Plantin (d. 1589). Although Akbar took great pleasure in this acquisition, he remained keen on having a Persian translation of the Gospels. In 1582 he sought to contact Philip ii (r. 1556–98) through Father Monserrate, requesting copies of the Holy Books in Arabic or Persian. However, due to the overload of Portuguese ships, the embassy was never able to leave the port of Goa. Facing this inconvenience, Akbar commissioned instead his court chronicler Abuʾl Fazl (d. 1602) to undertake the translation project, perhaps overestimating the latter's alleged knowledge of the Pentateuch and the Gospels.