The shrine of Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer in northern India is the clearest working example of what shrine veneration actually looks like at scale. Founded in the twelfth century by a Sufi teacher whose order, the Chishtiyya, became the most widespread in South Asia, the shrine now draws several million visitors a year, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs among them, and its annual urs, marking the saint's death anniversary and kept as his wedding with God, fills the surrounding town for days with pilgrims, musicians and vendors of flowers and cloth offerings. Indian heads of government and state officials have sent ceremonial chadars, cloth coverings for the grave, to the shrine as a matter of political courtesy for decades, which shows how thoroughly the practice has become woven into regional public life rather than remaining a purely devotional matter.
Salafi and Wahhabi scholarship rejects the entire practice on textual grounds, arguing that seeking a saint's intercession, visiting a grave for blessing, or treating any created being as capable of helping a supplicant constitutes shirk, associating partners with God, and that the Prophet himself warned against turning graves into places of worship. That objection is not merely theoretical: shrines associated with saint veneration have been targets of demolition and bombing by militant groups holding this position, in Pakistan, Mali and elsewhere, which makes the dispute over shrine veneration one of the few theological disagreements inside Islam that has produced sustained physical violence against religious sites themselves.