A petition in court has sought a survey of the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, based on claims that it was constructed after demolishing ‘Hindu and Jain’ temples. What is the history of the dargah, and of the revered Sufi saint who rests there?

A court in Ajmer last Wednesday admitted a petition requesting a survey of the Ajmer Sharif Dargah, the shrine of the revered Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti (also spelt ‘Muinuddin’, ‘Muiniiddin’, or ‘Mu’in al-din’). The petition claims that the dargah was constructed “after demolishing Hindu and Jain temples” that stood at the site.

The town and the dargah

Ajmer, then referred to as Ajaymeru, was once the capital of the Chauhans, a Rajput clan that ruled parts of present-day Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh from the seventh to the 12th centuries CE. Ajaydeva is credited with constructing the city in the mid-12th century.

The town was sacked by the Afghan invader Muhammad of Ghor after he defeated Prithviraj III (popularly known as Prithviraj Chauhan) in the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192. The Ghurid army killed, looted, and “destroyed the pillars and foundatio ns of the idol temples” in Ajaymeru, Har Bilas Sarda, an Ajmer-based jurist, wrote in Ajmer: Historical and Descriptive (1911). Sarda’s book is the primary source material cited in the petition filed before the court.

“In the middle of the fifteenth century AD, it is said that tigers used to roam where the tomb of Khwaja Muiniiddin Chishti stands,” Sarda wrote.

The mausoleum itself was built some time in the second half of the 15th century. According to tradition, Sarda wrote, the cellar in which the Khwaja was interred houses “the image of Mahadeva in a temple, on which sandal used to be placed every day by a Brahman family still maintained by the Dargah gharyali (bell striker)”.

His account, however, does not say that a temple was destroyed to build the dargah.

“At one place…there was an ancient shrine sacred to Mahadeva, the lingam of which was hidden by leaves and rubbish. To this wood the Khwaja had retired to contemplate [for] forty days; and every day he hung up his small mussuq of water on a branch of a tree overhanging the lingam. The water constantly dropped on this. At length Mahadeva became highly pleased… [and] spoke out of the stone commending his virtue,” Irvine wrote.

Historian P M Currie, who cited Irvine’s work in The Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-din Chishti Ajmer (1989), mentioned a different version of this legend, in which the lingam lies underneath the Khwaja’s tomb.

These legends narrated by Ajmer Sharif’s khadims serve to explain why people from all faiths and all walks of life come to pay their respects to the Khwaja. Speaking about the legend of Moinuddin’s encounter with Lord Shiva, Irvine wrote: “From this tradition…the Hindus equally venerate the Khwaja with the Mahomedans”.

One can find such stories about many Sufi shrines across India. Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, emerged between the seventh and 10th centuries as a counterweight to the orthodoxy of the clergy, and the increasing worldliness of the ummah.

Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer exemplified this heterodoxy. He “watched ascetics perform yoga… He realised how much he had in common with the wandering mystics of the land who, like him, were unafraid to express their utter devotion to their creator as the ultimate means of achieving spiritual perfection,” historian Mehru Jaffer wrote in The Book of Muinuddin Chishti (2008).

Born in 1141 in Sistan, a province in Persia (Iran), Moinuddin was orphaned at the age of 14. He was set on his spiritual journey after a chance encounter with a wandering mystic named Ibrahim Qandozi, who is said to have advised him to seek out the truth that lay beyond loneliness, death, and destruction (Jaffer). By the time he turned 20, Moinuddin had travelled widely, and had studied theology, grammar, philosophy, ethics, and religion in the seminaries of Bukhara and Samarkand.

In Herath (in present-day Afghanistan), Moinuddin met Khwaja Usman Harooni, a Sufi master of the Chishti order, in whom he found a mentor and spiritual teacher, and was initiated into the Chishti silsila (chain of spiritual descent).

Moinuddin accepted Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki as his first follower, with whom he journeyed to Multan, where he studied Sanskrit and talked to Hindu scholars. He then went to Lahore, then to Delhi, and finally reached Ajmer in 1191.

He met his wife, Bibi Ummatullah, in Ajmer, and decided to stay in the city. “The modest home of Bibi and Muinuddin made of mud soon became a refuge for all those without roof, shelter or food, and for those seeking solace and peace. His generosity and amazing acts of selflessness earned Muinuddin the title of Gharib Nawaz, or friend of the poor,” Jaffer wrote.

Development of the shrine

Moinuddin died in 1236. “On the death of the Khwaja, his remains were interred in the cell in which he lived, but no masonry tomb was built over them. In fact he appears to have been forgotten in Ajmer,” Sarda wrote.

A pucca mausoleum for the pir was first constructed in the 1460s by the Khalji rulers of Malwa (not to be confused with the Khalji sultans of Delhi). Sultan Mahmud Khan Khalji and his son Ghiyasuddin built the Buland Darwaza, the dargah’s massive northern gateway.

The architecture of this gateway has been cited in the petition. Quoting Sarda, the petition says that “this gate is supported on either side by three-storied chatrees of carved stone, the spoils of some Hindu building. The materials and the style of these chatrees plainly betray their Hindu origin… It is also stated that these chatrees and the gate…formed part of an old Jain temple, which was demolished”.

The current white marble dome of the Ajmer Dargah was built in 1532, during the reign of the Mughal emperor Humayun, according to an inscription on the northern wall of the building.

But the real expansion in Ajmer took place during the reign of Akbar, who was a great 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 times… The construction of religious structures was encouraged by the new status that Akbar’s interest in the Chishti sect conferred upon the city; this was enhanced by imperial decree,” historian Catherine B Asher wrote in her seminal work Architecture of Mughal India (1992).

In the early 1570s, Akbar had a mosque — now referred to as the Akbari Masjid — built to the west of the shrine’s southern entrance.

Further construction took place during the reigns of emperors Jahangir (1605-27) and Shah Jahan (1628-58). In 1616, Jahangir had a “gold railing with lattice work” built around the tomb of the saint.