The order takes its name not from its most famous teacher but from a place he never founded: Chisht, a small town near Herat in present day Afghanistan, where a line of masters had already been practising a distinct Sufi discipline for generations before any of them travelled east. Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti, born around 1141, inherited that line rather than starting it, and it was his own journey that carried it into a new country. He studied and travelled widely across the central Islamic lands, by tradition passing through Bukhara, Samarkand and Baghdad, before arriving in India in the final years of the twelfth century, a period when Muslim rule was newly extending across the north of the subcontinent behind the armies of the Delhi Sultanate.
He settled at Ajmer, in present day Rajasthan, then a Hindu stronghold at the edge of the new sultanate's reach, and taught there for decades until his death in 1236.
Unlike many contemporaries who sought the patronage of courts, Muinuddin's teaching is remembered for its distance from political power and its welcome to visitors regardless of their faith, a reputation that shaped how the order behaved toward rulers for centuries afterward. His tomb at Ajmer, the Ajmer Sharif Dargah, grew over the following centuries into one of the most visited Muslim shrines anywhere in South Asia, drawing Hindu as well as Muslim pilgrims to its annual Urs, the commemoration of his death observed as a saint's true wedding with the divine rather than as a day of mourning.