Muinuddin Chishti's successors carried his order across the Delhi Sultanate through a chain of hospices, khanqahs, each built around a living shaykh rather than a fixed institution. Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki taught in Delhi itself; Fariduddin Ganjshakar, known as Baba Farid, established a hospice at Ajodhan in Punjab whose verses later entered Sikh scripture; and Nizamuddin Auliya, teaching in Delhi across the turn of the fourteenth century, built a following so wide that later chroniclers credited him with holding more real authority in the city than its sultans. Succession in the order passed by khilafat, a master's personal designation of a spiritual successor, rather than by descent within a family, which let leadership move to whichever disciple a shaykh judged ready rather than to an heir.
Nizamuddin Auliya's circle included the poet and musician Amir Khusrau, and it is in gatherings held under Chishti shaykhs that later tradition locates the growth of qawwali, devotional song performed to draw listeners toward a state of spiritual absorption, sama.
The practice was controversial among more legally minded scholars elsewhere in the Islamic world, who worried that music in worship invited excess, and Chishti masters answered by insisting on discipline in how and for whom it was performed rather than abandoning it. That devotional music remains alive today at Chishti shrines from Ajmer to Delhi, sung as praise and remembrance rather than as public entertainment, and the shrines themselves continue to draw pilgrims of multiple faiths in a pattern that traces directly back to Muinuddin Chishti's own openness eight centuries ago.
Sources Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and BeyondCarl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence with Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context and Meaning in QawwaliRegula Burckhardt Qureshi