Place · Chishti dargah · India

Ajmer Sharīf

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Chishti silsila; urs tradition

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

26.456, 74.628

Worth knowing

Akbar walked from Agra to Ajmer — roughly 350 kilometres — more than once, in fulfilment of vows. The dargah still receives offerings from Hindu and Sikh families as well as Muslim ones.

Connections (9)

• Silsila lineageQutb Sāhib, Mehrauli

  Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer and Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki at Delhi are the first two links of the Chishti chain in India, teacher and disciple. A silsila is a line of transmission, and on the ground it becomes a pilgrimage route running Ajmer, Delhi, Pakpattan, Delhi again — four tombs in four generations, each the destination of an annual urs, and the busiest devotional network in the subcontinent that is not a temple system.

• Site adjacencyPushkar

  Ajmer Sharif and the Brahma temple at Pushkar lie fifteen kilometres apart across a ridge — the two largest pilgrimage draws in Rajasthan, one a Chishti dargah that takes Hindu and Sikh pilgrims as well as Muslim, the other one of the very few Brahma temples anywhere, on a lake with its own cattle fair. Buses run between them all day and a great many visitors do both in one trip.

• Imperial devotion toFatehpur Sīkrī

  Akbar walked the three hundred and sixty kilometres from Agra to Ajmer on foot more than once, in fulfilment of vows, and built an entire capital at Fatehpur Sikri around the hermitage of Salim Chishti after the saint's blessing was credited with the birth of his heir. Imperial urbanism organised around a shrine is unusual anywhere; Fatehpur Sikri was abandoned within fifteen years, largely for want of water, and the tomb is what is still visited.

• Chishti SilsilaHazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi

  Muʿīnuddīn at Ajmer, Quṭbuddīn Bakhtiyār Kākī and Farīduddīn Ganj-i-Shakar, then Nizāmuddīn at Delhi: the Chishti succession runs through four generations and about four hundred kilometres, and each seat became a town's principal shrine. The order's rule against attending courts is what gave the shrines their independent standing. Nizāmuddīn refused to attend any of the seven sultans whose reigns he lived through, and the refusal is what the shrines' independence from the state has rested on ever since.

• Monastic foundationMuʿīnuddīn Chishtī

  Muʿīnuddīn settled at Ajmer about 1192, in a town the Ghurids had just taken, and the order he founded there became the most widely followed in South Asia. Its rules — refuse the court, own nothing, feed everyone, and use music — are what separated it from every other silsila in the subcontinent.

• Silsila lineageKachhauchha Sharif, Ambedkarnagar

  Makhdūm Ashraf Jahāngīr Simnānī, said in the tradition to have abandoned a throne in Simnan in Persia and come east, founded the Chishti-Ashrafi branch at Kachhauchha in Awadh in the fourteenth century. The shrine is one of north India's principal centres for healing and exorcism, which is what a great many dargahs actually do week to week, and the crowds it draws for that purpose come from every community in the region.

• Craft tradition ofQawwālī

  Ajmer carries the same assembly on a far larger scale, and the ʿurs of Muʿīnuddīn Chishtī each Rajab is the biggest qawwālī occasion in South Asia, drawing singing parties from Delhi, Punjab and Sindh as well as hereditary Ajmer lineages. The form travelled the Chishti silsila rather than any court circuit, which is why its geography is a chain of tombs from Ajmer and Delhi to Pakpattan and Gulbarga rather than a chain of capitals.

• Fought nearQutb-ud-Din Aibak

  Qutb-ud-Din Aibak commanded Muhammad of Ghur's forces at the two battles of Tarain near Ajmer in 1191 and 1192 — defeating Prithviraj Chauhan the second time and ending the Rajput Chauhan state at Ajmer. The Ajmer Sharif dargah of Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti was established at Ajmer within a decade of the Chauhan defeat, and the Chishti silsila's spread through north India followed the Ghurid military conquests Aibak led.

• Teaching lineageTakia Mazar, Ambikapur

  The Takiya shrine is the Sufi presence in a district whose cults are otherwise goddess and Shiva. Like most dargahs of the eastern uplands it stands in the broad Chishti ambit of which Ajmer is the centre.

On these journeys

• Chishti silsila
• Major dargahs
• Sir Thomas Roe — the first English embassy (1615–19)
• Sant, Bhakti & Sufi Networks

Sources

Ajmer Sharif Dargah — Wikipedia

• Wikipedia — Ajmer Sharif Dargah