The dargah of Muin al-Din Chishti at Ajmer is the most important Sufi shrine in South Asia, and a place whose visitors have never been only Muslim.
The saint and the order
Muin al-Din Chishti, who died at Ajmer in 1236, founded the Chishti order in the subcontinent, the most influential of the Sufi lineages of South Asia. The Chishtis taught poverty, tolerance of other faiths, service to the poor and the use of music, especially the devotional singing called qawwali, as a means to God. That combination made the order enormously popular and, to stricter jurists, permanently suspect. A shrine grew over the saint's grave, patronised over the centuries by sultans and Mughal emperors, some of whom walked to it as pilgrims.
The dargah and its devotion
The dargah complex, entered through great gateways, centres on the domed tomb, before which pilgrims offer flowers, cloth and prayers and tie threads in petition. Its annual urs, the commemoration of the saint's death understood as his union with God, draws vast crowds, and qawwali is sung at the shrine. The devotion is intercessory: petitioners ask the saint to carry their needs, a practice central to South Asian Sufi piety and criticised by reformist currents that regard it as improper.
A shared and contested space
Ajmer Sharif has for centuries been visited by Hindus and Sikhs as well as Muslims, which is why it functions in Indian public argument as evidence of a shared devotional culture, and, for those hostile to that idea from any direction, as a problem. It remains a living, intensely active shrine drawing pilgrims from across the subcontinent and beyond, its significance bound up with the wider place of Sufism in the religious life of the region.