A Chain of Shrines Built by Four Great Successors

The Chishtiyya's spread across the Indian subcontinent followed a clear line of successor saints, each establishing his own major shrine and each shrine becoming, in turn, a pilgrimage centre in its own right: Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki at Delhi, Baba Farid at Pakpattan in what is now Pakistan, and Nizamuddin Auliya, whose Delhi shrine remains among the most visited Sufi sites in South Asia, extended Muin al-Din Chishti's original teaching from Ajmer into a network of major centres across North India within a few generations of the order's founding.

One disciple in this line left an influence reaching well beyond Sufi devotion itself: Amir Khusrau, a follower of Nizamuddin Auliya, is widely credited with major contributions to the development of qawwali, the devotional music still performed at Chishti shrines, and to Hindustani classical music more broadly, making the order's embrace of musical audition, sama, as a path to spiritual absorption a lasting influence on South Asian culture well outside strictly religious contexts. That embrace of music remained controversial among more legally minded jurists throughout Chishti history, but it never dislodged sama from the order's devotional core the way similar objections eventually curtailed musical practice in some other orders.