Journey
Sufi orders beyond Chishti
The Chishtis are the order everyone knows, and they are one of five. The Suhrawardis took state money the Chishtis refused, the Naqshbandis argued for orthodoxy against Akbar's syncretism, the Firdausis stayed in Bihar, the Qadiris kept out of politics and the Kashmiri Rishis grew out of Śaivism and wrote in Kashmiri.
Stops (5)
- Bahāuddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Ālam · Suhrawardi — Multan, and the case for taking the money
Bahāuddīn Zakariyā built the Suhrawardi centre at Multan from the 1220s on exactly the opposite principle to the Chishtis: accept the sultan's grants, hold land, keep the order rich and near power. He died wealthy and the order stayed solvent, and its tomb architecture set the pattern for shrines across Sindh and the Punjab.
- Miān Mīr · Qadiri — Miān Mīr, and keeping out of it
A Qadiri shaikh of Lahore who refused Mughal patronage and whom Dara Shukoh took as his master. Sikh tradition holds that Guru Arjan asked him to lay the Harmandir's foundation stone; historians dispute it, both communities repeat it, and the story has done more work in the Punjab for four centuries than the evidence would justify.
- Ahmad Sirhindi · Naqshbandi — Ahmad Sirhindi, and the argument for orthodoxy
The Mujaddid Alf-i Sānī, who argued from Sirhind against Akbar's religious experiments and against the doctrine that everything is God, insisting instead that the unity is of witness rather than of being. Jahangir jailed him for a year. His letters shaped South Asian reformist Islam for three centuries afterwards.
- Sharafuddin Manerī · Firdausi — Sharafuddin Manerī, and staying put
The Bihari shaikh whose khānqāh at Bihar Sharīf stood a short distance from Nālandā's ruins, and whose Maktūbāt-i Sadī — a hundred letters of spiritual instruction — were copied as far as the Deccan. The Firdausis never spread beyond Bihar, which is why their literature travelled further than their order did.
- Nund Rishi · Rishi — Nund Rishi, and a Kashmiri order
Sheikh Nūruddīn founded the one Sufi order indigenous to the subcontinent rather than imported into it. Its practice drew on Kashmiri Śaiva asceticism and on Lal Ded of the previous generation, it wrote in Kashmiri rather than Persian, and it was vegetarian — a Muslim order shaped by the valley it grew in.