Ajmer

Muinuddin Chishti came to Ajmer from Central Asia at the end of the twelfth century and died there in 1236. Almost nothing certain is known about his life; what exists is a body of tradition, assembled by the order that formed around his memory, describing a teacher who settled among a non Muslim population and drew people by feeding them and listening to them rather than by argument.

The shrine that grew over his grave has been enlarged by successive rulers for eight hundred years. Akbar walked to it from Agra in fulfilment of a vow after the birth of an heir, and presented the enormous cooking vessels that still stand in the courtyard, in which rice is prepared and distributed to visitors. Later Mughals, Marathas and princely rulers added gates, mosques and endowments.

The dargah is administered under an act of the Indian parliament, with hereditary families of attendants who trace their office back for generations, and it is one of the very few religious institutions in the subcontinent visited in comparable numbers by Muslims and Hindus, along with Sikhs, Christians and others who come to make and discharge vows. The annual urs, six days marking the anniversary of the saint's death and reckoned by the lunar month of Rajab, fills the city, and Indian prime ministers of every party have sent the ceremonial cloth for the tomb. A bomb at the shrine during the urs season in 2007 killed several pilgrims, and the prosecutions that followed made the attack on such shrines a matter of public record.

The order that traces itself to Ajmer became the largest Sufi tradition in South Asia, and its distinguishing positions are worth stating because they were contested from the beginning. Chishtis permitted sama, the disciplined listening to sung poetry as a devotional exercise, which stricter jurists regarded as forbidden entertainment. They held that a master should keep away from rulers and refuse land grants, so as not to owe anyone. And they made the free kitchen a central obligation rather than an occasional charity.

The chain runs from Muinuddin through Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki at Delhi, Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar in the Punjab, whose verses were later included in the Sikh scripture, and Nizamuddin Auliya back at Delhi. Each of those tombs became a centre in turn, so the order is mapped across northern India as a series of shrines rather than as a set of monasteries.

Ajmer holds more than the dargah. The mosque known as Adhai Din ka Jhonpra, built at the end of the twelfth century from the materials of dismantled temples and colleges, is one of the earliest Islamic buildings in India and carries an inscribed screen of great refinement. A short distance away lies Pushkar, with its lake and one of the very few temples anywhere dedicated to Brahma, and a Jain temple in Ajmer itself holds an elaborate gilded model of the Jain cosmos.