Place · Sufi khanqah · India
Shah-e-Hamadan, Srinagar
Also known as Hamadan, Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, Shah, Shah-e-Hamadan, Srinagar
The 14-century Shah-e-Hamadan Khanqah at Srinagar on the Jhelum river bank — the Khanqah-e-Mu'alla of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani (1314-1384), the Suhrawardi Sufi master from Hamadan, Iran, who played a central role in the Islamisation of Kashmir in the 14-century. Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani visited Kashmir three times between 1372 and 1384 under the patronage of Sultan Qutbuddin Shah Mir, bringing 700 Sayyid followers and establishing the Kashmiri Islamic tradition through the Rishi Order of Kashmiri Sufis (an indigenous syncretic Sufi order combining Islamic mysticism with Kashmiri Shaiva traditions). The Khanqah's distinctive wooden pagoda-style structure (unique for a Kashmiri Islamic building) is 1395 with major 17-century and 1731 reconstructions. The 1480 fire and subsequent renovations preserved the original design. ASI protection since 1911.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.091, 74.808
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyHazratbal Shrine, Srinagar
Hazratbal on the Dal Lake and the Shāh-e-Hamadān khānqāh on the Jhelum are Srinagar's two great Muslim buildings and could not be less alike: white marble around a hair of the Prophet, and a wooden khānqāh built without a nail for the Kubrawi who brought shawl weaving, papier-mâché and carpet craft to the valley with his order. The theft of the Hazratbal relic in December 1963 shut Kashmir down for a week.
- Shared sacred geographyLal Ded
Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī arrived in Srinagar with several hundred followers in the same century Lal Ded was composing, bringing the Kubrawi order and the crafts — shawl weaving, papier-mâché, carpets — that Kashmir has lived on since. Persian Sufism and Kashmiri Śaivism met in one valley within a generation, and what came out of the meeting was the Rishi order and a language with two scriptures' worth of poetry in it.
- Silsila lineageChaqchan Mosque, Khaplu
Both are attached to Sayyid Alī Hamadānī, the Kubrawi missionary credited with the conversion of Kashmir and of Baltistan in the fourteenth century, and both are built the same way. The Khanqah-e-Moula at Srinagar and Chaqchan at Khaplu are timber buildings with tiered roofs, carved pillars and verandahs, with almost nothing of the arch-and-dome vocabulary a mosque of that date would have further west. Islam arrived in both valleys in the architectural language of the religion it replaced, because the carpenters were the same carpenters.
- Site withinSrinagar
The Shah-e-Hamadan shrine stands on the right bank of the Jhelum in old Srinagar — a timber khanqah of the fourteenth century for the Suhrawardi mystic Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, who travelled from Iran in 1372 and shaped Kashmir's conversion to Islam more decisively than any single figure. The present Kashmiri wooden shrine is one of the oldest surviving timber mosques in the valley and has been rebuilt after fires several times without changing its form.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani”. Chishti tazkira literature; Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love (2002).
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