Place · Suhrawardi dargah complex · Pakistan

Bahāuddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Ālam

Also known as Multan — Bahauddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Alam

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Suhrawardi silsila

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

30.201, 71.476

Connections (6)

• Life routeGuru Nanak

  At Multan the Suhrawardi shaikhs are said to have sent Nanak a bowl of milk filled to the brim, meaning the city already had all the holy men it needed, and he floated a jasmine flower on the surface and returned it. The exchange is told by both traditions. Multan's Suhrawardi shrines are among the oldest in the subcontinent, and the milk-and-flower exchange is told there as readily as in the janamsākhis, which is unusual for a story about an outsider.

• Silsila lineageUch Sharīf

  Uch Sharīf and Multan are the two Suhrawardi centres of the southern Punjab, ninety kilometres apart at two river junctions, and between them they hold the order's Indian history. Multan has Bahāuddīn Zakariyā and Rukn-e-Alam's great brick dome; Uch has the Jahāniyān Jahāngasht and Bībī Jawindī tombs in glazed blue tilework, several of them taken by a flood that cut the river through the site in 1817.

• Site adjacencyPrahlādpuri & the Multan Sun Temple

  One mound at Multan carried all of it. The Aditya or Sun temple that Xuanzang and al-Bīrūnī describe stood on the citadel; Prahlādpuri, the Narasimha temple ascribed in legend to Prahlāda, stood on the same high ground; and Bahāuddin Zakariya's shrine and Rukn-e-Ālam's tomb were built there from the thirteenth century. The temples are gone — the Sun temple through successive medieval destructions, Prahlādpuri in 1992 — and the Suhrawardi tombs remain, so the mound now presents only the last of its several religious orders.

• Craft tradition ofKāshī kāri

  Multan is where kāshī kāri is at its most concentrated. Rukn-e-Ālam's tomb of the 1320s and Bahāuddin Zakariya's shrine are faced in glazed tile — cobalt, turquoise and white over brick, with the geometry adjusted to a tapering octagonal drum — and the technique has been practised in the city continuously since. The craft arrived from Kāshān in Iran with Central Asian workmen under the Ghaznavids and after, and the shrines of the Suhrawardi order in Multan are what it was mainly used for.

• Route adjacencyDera Ismāʿīl Khān & the Derajat

  Multan and the two Deras are the Saraiki-speaking Indus belt, and they belong to one another rather than to the Punjab above or Sindh below. The Derajat was settled by Baloch tribes coming east out of the hills in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Multan was the old city of the same reach of river, with its Suhrawardi shrines and its tilework. The speech, the shrine culture and the Baloch descent run continuously from Dera Ismāʿīl Khān down through Dera Ghāzī Khān to Multan and beyond.

• Site withinMultan

  Bahauddin Zakariya's khanqah of 1222 and his descendant Rukn-e-Alam's octagonal tiled tomb of 1320 are the Multan Suhrawardi Sufi order's two foundational monuments — both sit on the fort mound at the heart of the old walled city of Multan, within the Qila Kuhna Qasim Bagh ensemble. The two shrines together are the central Islamic geography of Multan and the reason the city remains the Suhrawardi order's subcontinental anchor.

On these journeys

• Major dargahs
• Sufi orders beyond Chishti
• Xuanzang — sixteen years overland (629–645)
• Al-Bīrūnī — the scholar in Maḥmūd's train (c. 1017–1030)
• Ibn Baṭṭūṭa — qāḍī, exile, envoy (1333–1347)
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush
• Guru Nanak's fifth udasi — within Punjab
• Punjab before partition — five rivers, one landscape

Sources

Shrine of Bahauddin Zakariya — Wikipedia

• Wikipedia — Shrine of Bahauddin Zakariya
• Wikipedia