Place · Sufi dargah · India
Sarmad Shaheed Dargah, Old Delhi
Also known as Old Delhi, Sarmad Kashani, Sarmad Shaheed Dargah
The dargah of Sarmad Kashani (1590-1661) at Jama Masjid in Old Delhi — the Armenian-Jewish-born Persian poet who converted to Islam, became a Sufi fakir, famously went naked in public, and was executed by Aurangzeb at the Jama Masjid steps in 1661 for heresy (specifically for reciting only the first half of the kalima 'There is no God...' without completing 'but Allah'). Sarmad was a mentor to Dara Shikoh and was executed shortly after Dara's own execution. His Persian rubaiyat (quatrains) express a strong wahdat-ul-wujud (unity of being) mysticism that transcended religious boundaries. His dargah sits at the foot of the Jama Masjid where he was beheaded; the fact that his executed-saint shrine stands at the mosque's steps makes it an architectural statement of post-execution veneration. The annual Urs each August-September draws Sufi devotees.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.654, 77.236
Connections (2)
- Succession in timeGuru Gobind Singh
Sarmad, an Armenian Jewish merchant turned naked Persian-writing mystic, was beheaded at the Jama Masjid steps in 1661; Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded at Chandni Chowk fourteen years later, a few hundred metres away. Aurangzeb's two most-remembered executions in Delhi were of men who threatened nothing but his claim to decide what belief was permissible, and both graves are now shrines.
- Site withinDelhi
Sarmad Shaheed Dargah, Old Delhi sits inside Delhi 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, “Sarmad Kashani”. Chishti tazkira literature; Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love (2002).
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