Moinuddin Chishti is the figure through whom the Chishti order enters India. The order takes its name from Chisht, a town in what is now western Afghanistan, and he is presented in its literature as the disciple who carried the lineage into the subcontinent and settled at Ajmer in Rajasthan, where he died in 1236.
What the order became there is easier to describe than what he did. The Chishtis of the following two centuries kept practices that set them apart from other orders and made them unusually visible: they accepted listeners of any religion and any caste at their gatherings, they refused endowments and gifts from rulers as a matter of principle, and they made devotional music central to their assemblies, which is the root of the qawwali tradition still performed at their shrines. Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence's history of the order treats these commitments as the reason it spread faster and further in India than its rivals.
The shrine at Ajmer, the dargah, is now among the largest sites of pilgrimage in South Asia. The urs, the annual observance of the anniversary of his death, brings very large numbers of people, and the visitors are by no means only Muslim; Hindu and Sikh pilgrims come in quantity, and Mughal emperors before them made the journey. That shared use is one of the things the site is best known for, and it has also made it a target in periods of communal tension.