Place · island Sufi dargah · India
Haji Ali Dargah, Mumbai
Also known as Haji Ali Dargah, Mumbai, Sayyed Peer Haji Ali Shah Bukhari
The Haji Ali Dargah on an islet in Mumbai's Worli Bay, Maharashtra — the 15-century dargah of Sayyid Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari (c.1400-1431), a Sufi merchant-mystic from Bukhara in Central Asia who settled in Bombay in the early 15-century. According to legend, Haji Ali gave up his wealth and travelled to Mecca for the Hajj; on his return to Bombay, his coffin was found floating off the Worli coast, and the dargah was built on the islet. The current dargah structure is 1870 with major 1960s and 2010s renovations. The 500-metre causeway connecting the mainland to the islet is submerged at high tide, making the dargah accessible only during low tide. The dargah draws over 15,000 pilgrims daily and over 100,000 on Thursdays and Fridays — the second-most-visited Muslim shrine in Mumbai after Mahim's Makhdoom Ali Mahaimi.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.983, 72.809
Connections (2)
- Companion in the same setMakhdoom Ali Mahaimi, Mahim
Haji Ali on its causeway islet and Makhdūm ʿAlī Māhimī at Mahim are Mumbai's two great dargahs, both on the shoreline of what were separate islands before the city was joined together. Māhimī was a Konkani Muslim scholar and qāzī who wrote Qur'anic commentary in Arabic; the Mumbai police have presented the first chādar at his urs every year for decades, which puts a fourteenth-century saint in the civic calendar.
- Site withinMumbai
Haji Ali Dargah, Mumbai sits inside Mumbai and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Haji Ali Dargah”. Chishti tazkira literature; Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love (2002).
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