Place · Firdausi Sufi dargah · India
Bihar Sharīf
The town in Nalanda district, Bihar, holding the shrine of Sharfuddin Yahya Maneri (1263-1381), the Firdausi Sufi master whose Maktubat-i-Sadi (hundred letters to his disciples) is the foundational Sufi theological text of Bihar. Yahya Maneri's forty-year retreat at Bihar Sharif in a cave is said to have produced the correspondence collected by his disciples. The dargah sits a short distance from the ruins of Nalanda mahavihara — a Sufi centre growing on the ground of a fallen Buddhist monastic landscape. The Chota and Bara Dargah each hold tombs of successor saints. The annual urs each Shaban draws devotees from across Bihar and Jharkhand.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Firdausi silsila
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.200, 85.520
Connections (2)
- Succeeds atNālandā mahāvihāra
The Firdausi shrine of Sharfuddin Yahya Maneri at Bihar Sharif grew up a few kilometres from Nalanda's ruins, on ground where a Buddhist university had taught for seven hundred years until its destruction in the 1190s. One institution of learning and devotion replaced another on the same plain, in a different language and religion, and the town's name — Bihar, from vihara, monastery — kept the older one and eventually gave it to the state.
- Silsila lineageManer Sharif, Patna district
Maner Sharīf west of Patna is the elder seat of the Firdausi lineage and Bihar Sharīf its greatest khānqāh — the Barī Dargāh of Makhdūm Yahyā at one, and at the other his descendant Sharafuddin Manerī, whose hundred letters were copied across India. The Firdausis stayed small and stayed in Bihar while the Chishtis spread, which is why almost nobody outside the state has heard of them.
On these journeys
Sources
Bihar Sharif; Makhdum Sharfuddin Maneri
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