Nizamuddin Auliya stood fourth in the chain of Chishti spiritual authority in India, following Moinuddin Chishti, who first established the order at Ajmer, Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki and Fariduddin Ganjshakar, and it was under Nizamuddin, based in Delhi through the reigns of seven successive sultans, that the order reached its widest influence in the subcontinent.
Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence's history of the Chishti order describes his khanqah, his hospice and teaching residence, as drawing an extraordinarily broad following, ordinary townspeople, merchants, poets and provincial nobility alongside serious spiritual seekers, while Nizamuddin himself maintained a famously consistent policy of declining audiences with the sultans of his own day, a deliberate distance from court politics that later Chishti hagiography reads as principled independence from worldly power rather than mere reticence. That reputation survived a direct test: Delhi's ruling sultan reportedly demanded Nizamuddin leave the city as a new palace was being built nearby, and tradition holds that Nizamuddin's calm refusal, framed as trust in God's protection rather than open defiance, outlasted the sultan's own reign, since the ruler died before the confrontation could be forced to a conclusion, a story Chishti sources have long used to illustrate the shaykh's spiritual authority set against, and ultimately outlasting, political power.