Almost everything commonly told about Moinuddin Chishti comes from sources composed long after he died. The principal Chishti biographical collections were compiled in the fourteenth century and later, and the discourses attributed to the early masters, the malfuzat, present a difficulty that Ernst and Lawrence set out plainly: several of the best known collections are of doubtful authenticity, produced in the fifteenth century or afterwards and back-dated, and they have supplied a great deal of what circulates as his biography.
The consequences reach the basic facts. His birth is usually placed around 1141 and in Sistan or near Chisht, but the date and the place both rest on later report. The account of his travels, his meeting with his master, and his arrival in India by way of Lahore and Delhi are hagiography before they are chronicle. The story that he came to Ajmer at the Prophet's direction and that the city fell to Muslim arms through his intervention belongs to a genre of narrative that establishes a shrine's authority, and historians read it as such. The death in 1236 is the most securely fixed point in the sequence.
None of this diminishes the figure, and the atlas is not in the business of debunking a living devotion. It does mean that the honest description of what is known is short, that the fuller story is a tradition's account of itself rather than a chronicle, and that the two should not be presented as the same kind of statement. Where the sources allow only the second, this atlas says so.