Place · Sufi shrine city · Pakistan
Multan
Also known as Multan, Multān, Mulasthana
One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the Punjab, on the Chenab river, and the subcontinent's central Suhrawardi Sufi city since the thirteenth century — Bahauddin Zakariya's khanqah of 1222 and Rukn-e-Alam's octagonal tiled tomb of 1320 anchor its Sufi geography. Multan was the capital of a succession of states (the Katoch dynasty, the Umayyad frontier after 712, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate's southwestern frontier, the independent nawabate, Ranjit Singh's Sikh Empire from 1818, and British Punjab after 1849). Its blue-and-white kashi tile tradition, which Lahore later borrowed, is the single most consequential glazed-ceramic tradition of the subcontinent.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Katoch · Umayyad · Ghaznavid · Sultanate · Durrani · Sikh · British · Pakistan
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 30.157, 71.525
Connections (2)
- Site withinBahāuddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Ālam
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.
- Site adjacencyUch Sharīf
Uch Sharif — the Suhrawardi and Qadiri dargah complex where the Sutlej meets the Chenab — sits about 110 kilometres southwest of Multan in Bahawalpur district. Uch and Multan together are the Suhrawardi order's twin southern Punjab Sufi centres, with the Multan khanqah of Bahauddin Zakariya and the Uch khanqahs of Jalaluddin Bukhari and Makhdum Jahaniyan forming one connected thirteenth-and-fourteenth-century Sufi geography.