Mu'in al-Din Chishti

Mu'in al-Din Chishti (born c. 1142 CE / c. 537 AH; died c. 1236 CE / c. 633 AH) is the figure most associated with the spread of the Chishtiyya — a Sufi order, that is, a brotherhood organized around a chain of spiritual masters and disciples — in the Indian subcontinent. He is popularly titled "Gharib Nawaz" ("benefactor of the poor"). Tradition holds he was born in Sistan (Sijistan), a region straddling today's eastern Iran and Afghanistan, into a family later said to be of Sayyid (Prophetic) descent.

Here the historian must be careful. According to P. M. Currie's scholarship, no contemporary chronicler mentions Mu'in al-Din; the three near-contemporary historians of the period are silent. Almost everything about his life comes from devotional biographies (manaqib) such as the Siyar al-Awliya', compiled more than a century after his death. These later sources report that he studied at the seminaries of Bukhara and Samarkand, met his spiritual guide Uthman Harwani in the Nishapur region, journeyed across the Islamic east, paused at Lahore to meditate at the tomb of the earlier mystic Ali Hujwiri, and finally settled at Ajmer in Rajasthan, where he died and was buried.

What is reasonably secure is the broad shape: a Persian-speaking Sufi of Khurasani background who reached northern India in the early thirteenth century and around whom an enormously influential order and cult later crystallized. The famous tales of miracles, of converting a hostile king, and of Sultan Muhammad of Ghur visiting him belong to later hagiography rather than documented history.