Chishti Order

The Chishti order that traces itself to him is the largest Sufi tradition in the subcontinent.

The dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi is a principal shrine of the Chishti order.

Akbar built the city beside the retreat of the Chishti shaykh Salim, whose tomb stands at its centre.

One of the major tariqas of Sufism.

The tomb of Muin al-Din Chishti at Ajmer is the order's principal shrine and the largest pilgrimage of Indian Islam.

The shrine of al-Hujwiri at Lahore predates the order and is claimed across the Sufi traditions of the Punjab, the Chishtis among them.

Breath discipline paired with the remembrance formula is recorded in Chishti manuals, one of several techniques the order took up from the Indian environment it grew in.

The harmonium accompanies qawwali in the modern Chishti assembly, a nineteenth century import that the older practice did without.

Chishti shaykhs kept a deliberate distance from the courts and the schools, and the order's teaching passed through the hospice rather than the college.

The saying of the Prophet at Ghadir Khumm is the qawwali with which a Chishti assembly traditionally opens.

Qawwali is the Chishti form of audition, sung by hereditary performers at the order's shrines in South Asia, and it is how the order's teaching reaches people who read no Persian.

The Chishti retreat is the chilla, forty days of solitude, fasting and remembrance under a shaykh's direction, rather than the ten days spent in a mosque at the end of Ramadan.

The Chishti sama is an audition. The disciple listens to sung mystical poetry in an assembly held under a shaykh's control, without the turning ceremony the Mevlevi order made of the same word.

Trust in God is a station of the path in Chishti teaching, entered through discipline and poverty rather than a disposition a believer simply has.

Tawhid is affirmed in the Chishti order, and its interior reading of the doctrine follows the Akbarian line the order absorbed in South Asia.

Blessing is held to reside in the shaykh and to persist at his tomb, which is why the Chishti shrines at Ajmer and Delhi remain places of pilgrimage open to visitors of any religion.

Annihilation of the self in God and subsistence after it is the goal the Chishti path is arranged around.

The order understands itself as the cultivation of ihsan, worshipping God as though one sees Him, pursued under a living master.

Authority to teach and to initiate passes by a licence from master to disciple, the khilafat-nama, which is what makes a successor rather than merely a follower.

Chishti sheikhs issued written khilafat-nama certificates empowering khalifas to found new branch khanqahs, the documented mechanism by which the order spread across the Indian subcontinent.

The path is described as a sequence of stations attained by effort and states given by God, the standard Sufi map of the interior life.

Chishti sheikhs ran open khanqahs welcoming all faiths, prized sama over silent forms, and passed leadership to the most spiritually qualified disciple rather than by heredity, unlike several other tariqas.

The Chishti chain runs from Muin al-Din Chishti of Ajmer back through Khurasan to the Prophet, and initiation into that chain, rather than any office, is what confers authority in the order.

Reliance on God to the point of refusing endowments and accumulated wealth is a Chishti mark, and early Chishti masters declined state patronage on that ground.

Chishti teaching from the fourteenth century onward is substantially shaped by Ibn Arabi's oneness of being, and the order became one of its principal carriers in South Asia.

The finality of prophethood is affirmed in the Chishti order.

Sabr is affirmed in the Chishti order as a station of the path.

The Chishti order holds the sharia binding, and the order's long defence of sama, listening to sung poetry, was conducted as a legal argument about what the law permits rather than as an exemption from it.

Shukr is affirmed in the Chishti order as a station of the path.

Taqwa is affirmed in the Chishti order as a station of the path.

Tawbah is affirmed in the Chishti order as the first station of the path.

The dargah of Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer is the principal shrine of the Chishti order.