Place · Kashmiri Rishi shrine · India
Charār-e-Sharīf
Also known as Charar-i-Sharief, Chrar-e-Sharief, Nund Rishi, Nooruddin Noorani
The shrine of Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani — Nund Rishi — founder of the Kashmiri Rishi order and the figure in whom the valley's Islam and its older ascetic tradition meet. His shruks are recited by Muslims and Pandits alike, and Lal Ded is claimed as his spiritual predecessor.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Kashmiri Rishi tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.867, 74.767
Worth knowing
The shrine was a wooden building of the fifteenth century, one of the great timber structures of the Himalaya, and it burned down in May 1995 during a siege between militants and the army, with much of the town. It has been rebuilt. The Rishi order's shrines are the reason Kashmiri Islam is usually described as having grown out of the valley rather than arriving in it.
Connections (4)
- Companion in the same setMakhdoom Sahib, Srinagar
Makhdūm Sāhib sits inside the Mughal fort wall on Hari Parbat with a Sharika Devi temple on the same slope and a gurdwara at its foot, and Charār-e-Sharīf holds Nund Rishi, founder of the Kashmiri Rishi order. Between them they hold the valley's two Islamic strands: the Suhrawardi order that arrived from Central Asia, and the Rishi tradition that grew out of Kashmiri Śaivism and wrote in Kashmiri.
- Teaching lineageLal Ded
Tradition has the infant Nūruddīn refuse his mother's milk and take it from Lal Ded instead, which is the valley's way of saying that the Muslim order began in the Śaiva one. Whatever happened, his verse works in her forms and quotes her positions, and Charār-e-Sharīf's shrine is where a Muslim order that grew out of Kashmiri Śaivism has its centre. The wooden building burned in a 1995 siege and was rebuilt.
- Shared sacred geographyKheer Bhawani, Tulmulla
Kheer Bhawani at Tulmulla and the Rishi shrine at Charar-i-Sharief are the two poles of the valley's devotional life, forty kilometres apart: a spring goddess of the Kashmiri Pandits where milk is poured into the water and no animal is killed, and the tomb of Nund Rishi, whose shruks were recited by Pandits and Muslims alike. Kashmiri religion was a single idiom in two liturgies.
- Site adjacencyJamia Masjid, Srinagar
The Jamia Masjid and the Rishi shrines are the two halves of Kashmiri Islam: a congregational mosque of 1394 built on deodar columns in a Kashmiri timber idiom rather than a masonry one, and a line of ascetic shrines whose founder's verses are indistinguishable in idiom from Lal Ded's. Neither looks like anything in the plains, and that is the argument.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Charar-i-Sharief”. The shruks of Nund Rishi; Mohammad Ishaq Khan, Kashmir's Transition to Islam: The Role of Muslim Rishis (1994).
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