Moinuddin Chishti

Moinuddin Chishti is the figure through whom the Chishti order enters India. The order takes its name from Chisht, a town in what is now western Afghanistan, and he is presented in its literature as the disciple who carried the lineage into the subcontinent and settled at Ajmer in Rajasthan, where he died in 1236.

What the order became there is easier to describe than what he did. The Chishtis of the following two centuries kept practices that set them apart from other orders and made them unusually visible: they accepted listeners of any religion and any caste at their gatherings, they refused endowments and gifts from rulers as a matter of principle, and they made devotional music central to their assemblies, which is the root of the qawwali tradition still performed at their shrines. Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence's history of the order treats these commitments as the reason it spread faster and further in India than its rivals.

The shrine at Ajmer, the dargah, is now among the largest sites of pilgrimage in South Asia. The urs, the annual observance of the anniversary of his death, brings very large numbers of people, and the visitors are by no means only Muslim; Hindu and Sikh pilgrims come in quantity, and Mughal emperors before them made the journey. That shared use is one of the things the site is best known for, and it has also made it a target in periods of communal tension.

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.