A court docket in Ajmer final Wednesday admitted a petition requesting a survey of the Ajmer Sharif Dargah, the shrine of the revered Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti (additionally spelt ‘Muinuddin’, ‘Muiniiddin’, or ‘Mu’in al-din’). The petition claims that the dargah was constructed “after demolishing Hindu and Jain temples” that stood on the website.
Ajmer, then known as Ajaymeru, was as soon as the capital of the Chauhans, a Rajput clan that dominated components of present-day Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh from the seventh to the Twelfth centuries CE. Ajaydeva is credited with establishing town within the mid-Twelfth century.
The city was sacked by the Afghan invader Muhammad of Ghor after he defeated Prithviraj III (popularly generally known as Prithviraj Chauhan) within the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192. The Ghurid military killed, looted, and “destroyed the pillars and foundations of the idol temples” in Ajaymeru, Har Bilas Sarda, an Ajmer-based jurist, wrote in Ajmer: Historic and Descriptive (1911). Sarda’s ebook is the first supply materials cited within the petition filed earlier than the court docket.
Subsequently, town fell right into a state of disrepair for nearly 400 years, till it noticed a revival in the course of the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605).
“In the course of the fifteenth century AD, it’s stated that tigers used to roam the place the tomb of Khwaja Muiniiddin Chishti stands,” Sarda wrote.
The mausoleum itself was constructed a while within the second half of the fifteenth century. In line with custom, Sarda wrote, the cellar during which the Khwaja was interred homes “the picture of Mahadeva in a temple, on which sandal was once positioned day by day by a Brahman household nonetheless maintained by the Dargah gharyali (bell striker)”.
His account, nevertheless, doesn’t say {that a} temple was destroyed to construct the dargah.
Robert Hamilton Irvine in Some Account of the Basic and Medical Topography of Ajmeer (1841) wrote a couple of story he had heard from one in all Ajmer’s “most discovered khadims” (attendants).
“At one place…there was an historical shrine sacred to Mahadeva, the lingam of which was hidden by leaves and garbage. To this wooden the Khwaja had retired to ponder [for] forty days; and day by day he hung up his small mussuq of water on a department of a tree overhanging the lingam. The water consistently dropped on this. At size Mahadeva turned extremely happy… [and] spoke out of the stone commending his advantage,” Irvine wrote.
Historian P M Currie, who cited Irvine’s work in The Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-din Chishti Ajmer (1989), talked about a special model of this legend, during which the lingam lies beneath the Khwaja’s tomb.
Journey from Sistan to Ajmer
These legends narrated by Ajmer Sharif’s khadims serve to elucidate why folks from all faiths and all walks of life come to pay their respects to the Khwaja. Talking concerning the legend of Moinuddin’s encounter with Lord Shiva, Irvine wrote: “From this custom…the Hindus equally venerate the Khwaja with the Mahomedans”.
One can discover such tales about many Sufi shrines throughout India. Sufism, the paranormal facet of Islam, emerged between the seventh and tenth centuries as a counterweight to the orthodoxy of the clergy, and the growing worldliness of the ummah.
Sufi traditions — particularly these of the Chishti order of Sufism to which Moinuddin and later Sufi masters comparable to Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, and Nasiruddin Mahmud Chiragh Dehlavi, all of Delhi, belonged — drew closely from pre-existing native practices, which had been seen as heretical in orthodox Islam. The Chishti saints in India preached a message of tolerance and inclusivity.
Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer exemplified this heterodoxy. He “watched ascetics carry out yoga… He realised how a lot he had in widespread with the wandering mystics of the land who, like him, had been unafraid to specific their utter devotion to their creator as the last word technique of reaching non secular perfection,” historian Mehru Jaffer wrote in The Ebook of Muinuddin Chishti (2008).
Born in 1141 in Sistan, a province in Persia (Iran), Moinuddin was orphaned on the age of 14. He was set on his non secular journey after an opportunity encounter with a wandering mystic named Ibrahim Qandozi, who is claimed to have suggested him to hunt out the reality that lay past loneliness, dying, and destruction (Jaffer). By the point he turned 20, Moinuddin had travelled broadly, and had studied theology, grammar, philosophy, ethics, and faith within the seminaries of Bukhara and Samarkand.
In Herath (in present-day Afghanistan), Moinuddin met Khwaja Usman Harooni, a Sufi grasp of the Chishti order, in whom he discovered a mentor and non secular instructor, and was initiated into the Chishti silsila (chain of non secular descent).
Moinuddin accepted Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki as his first follower, with whom he journeyed to Multan, the place he studied Sanskrit and talked to Hindu students. He then went to Lahore, then to Delhi, and at last reached Ajmer in 1191.
He met his spouse, Bibi Ummatullah, in Ajmer, and determined to remain within the metropolis. “The modest house of Bibi and Muinuddin manufactured from mud quickly turned a refuge for all these with out roof, shelter or meals, and for these in search of solace and peace. His generosity and superb acts of selflessness earned Muinuddin the title of Gharib Nawaz, or buddy of the poor,” Jaffer wrote.
Growth of the shrine
Moinuddin died in 1236. “On the dying of the Khwaja, his stays had been interred within the cell during which he lived, however no masonry tomb was constructed over them. In reality he seems to have been forgotten in Ajmer,” Sarda wrote.
A pucca mausoleum for the pir was first constructed within the 1460s by the Khalji rulers of Malwa (to not be confused with the Khalji sultans of Delhi). Sultan Mahmud Khan Khalji and his son Ghiyasuddin constructed the Buland Darwaza, the dargah’s huge northern gateway.
The structure of this gateway has been cited within the petition. Quoting Sarda, the petition says that “this gate is supported on both facet by three-storied chatrees of carved stone, the spoils of some Hindu constructing. The supplies and the fashion of those chatrees plainly betray their Hindu origin… It’s also said that these chatrees and the gate…shaped a part of an previous Jain temple, which was demolished”.
The present white marble dome of the Ajmer Dargah was in-built 1532, in the course of the reign of the Mughal emperor Humayun, in keeping with an inscription on the northern wall of the constructing.
However the actual growth in Ajmer occurred in the course of the reign of Akbar, who was an amazing devotee of a later Chishti saint, Salim Chishti of Fatehpur Sikri.
“By 1579 Akbar had come on pilgrimage to the dargah of Mu’in al-Din Chishti in Ajmer fourteen instances… The development of spiritual buildings was inspired by the brand new standing that Akbar’s curiosity within the Chishti sect conferred upon town; this was enhanced by imperial decree,” historian Catherine B Asher wrote in her seminal work Structure of Mughal India (1992).
Within the early 1570s, Akbar had a mosque — now known as the Akbari Masjid — constructed to the west of the shrine’s southern entrance.
Additional building occurred in the course of the reigns of emperors Jahangir (1605-27) and Shah Jahan (1628-58). In 1616, Jahangir had a “gold railing with lattice work” constructed across the tomb of the saint.
