Lahore

Ali ibn Uthman al-Hujwiri came to Lahore from Ghazna in the eleventh century and died there. His importance rests on a book: the Kashf al-Mahjub, the unveiling of the hidden, is the earliest systematic account of Sufism written in Persian, and it does something unusual for a devotional work. It sets out the disagreements between schools, names the positions and their holders, describes the practices with their justifications and their abuses, and offers a reader a way into a tradition rather than a set of instructions. It was read across Persian speaking Asia for centuries and is still in print.

His shrine in the old city is one of the busiest in South Asia. It runs a kitchen that feeds thousands a day, holds an annual urs that fills the surrounding streets, and draws visitors of every social level; the title by which he is known, giver of treasures, is attributed by tradition to Muinuddin Chishti, who is said to have spent time at the tomb before going on to Ajmer.

Shrines of this kind have been the target of a sustained campaign of violence in Pakistan, and the Data Darbar was bombed in 2010 with dozens of deaths. That is not a detail to leave out, because it marks the sharpest religious division in the country: a devotional Islam centred on saints and their tombs against movements that regard veneration at graves as forbidden innovation. Both are Sunni, and the dispute is internal.

Guru Arjan, the fifth guru, compiled the Adi Granth in 1604, gathering the compositions of his predecessors together with those of Hindu and Muslim devotional poets, and installed it at Amritsar. Two years later he was summoned to Lahore by the emperor Jahangir, held in custody, and died. Jahangir's own memoir records that he ordered the guru's execution and the confiscation of his property; Sikh tradition adds the details of torture by heat and of his final bathing in the river Ravi. His death is generally treated as the point at which the Sikh community began to arm itself, and the sixth guru took up two swords for temporal and spiritual authority.

Gurdwara Dera Sahib stands at the place beside the Lahore fort. A few steps away is the samadhi of Ranjit Singh, who made Lahore the capital of a Sikh state that ruled the Punjab from 1799 until the British annexation of 1849, and who paid for the gilding that gives the Golden Temple its name.

Partition in 1947 put the city in Pakistan, and its Sikh and Hindu populations left in the violence of that year. The gurdwaras are maintained by a state property board, and pilgrim parties travel from India on fixed anniversaries under a visa arrangement between the two governments, so a community's access to its own foundational sites depends on the state of relations between two countries.