Sufism in the Deccan

The word Sufism — in Arabic Tasawwuf, in Persian and Urdu tasawwuf — names one of the three classical sciences of Islam, alongside 'Aqidah (theology) and Fiqh (jurisprudence). The Prophet ﷺ in the well-known Hadith of Jibreel (recorded in Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim) named the three dimensions of religion: Islam (the outward practice), Iman (the inward creed) and Ihsan ("to worship Allah as though you see Him; and if you see Him not, then know that He sees you"). The science that addresses this third dimension — the purification of the heart, the development of sincerity, the constant remembrance of God — is what later generations of Muslim scholars called Tasawwuf.

It is not a sect. The great expositors of Tasawwuf — Imam Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910), Imam al-Qushayri (d. 1072), Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111) in his Ihya 'Ulum al-Din, Imam al-Suhrawardi (d. 1234), Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762) — all wrote from within the four classical Sunni schools of law. The saints of the Deccan whose lives this page records were, almost without exception, Hanafi jurists, traditionists of Hadith, scholars of the Qur'an, mufassirun, and frequently muftis to their local sultanates. Their saintliness extended, did not replace, their adherence to the Sharia.

The Sufi method is conventionally summarised as tasfiyat al-qalb (the polishing of the heart) through dhikr (the remembrance of God), fikr (contemplation of His signs), nafl (supererogatory worship), and the company of a shaykh who has himself walked the path. The chain of teachers, called silsila ("chain"), is traced documentarily back to the Companions and through them to the Prophet ﷺ himself. The Deccan's four classical silsilas — Chishti, Qadiri, Suhrawardi, Naqshbandi — each preserve such a chain. To say of a Deccan saint that he was "of the Chishti silsila" is to make a precise scholarly claim about his line of teachers, comparable to a Hadith chain of transmission (isnad).

Islam first reached the Deccan in 711 with the Arab traders of the Konkan coast, but the established institutional Islam — with its mosques, madrasas, qadis and Sufi khanqahs — came south only with the Khalji and Tughluq invasions in the fourteenth century. When Ulugh Khan defeated Prataparudra II of Warangal in 1323 and when Muhammad bin Tughluq transferred his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in 1327, a substantial population of Delhi's scholars, jurists and Sufis moved south with the court.

Among them was the most consequential single Sufi migration in South Asian history. Khwaja Nizamuddin Awliya (d. 1325 at Delhi) — the great Chishti master of the Delhi Sultanate, disciple of Khwaja Baba Farid of Pakpattan — had trained dozens of khalifas (successors) in his hospice. When Muhammad bin Tughluq moved south, several of these khalifas accompanied him by imperial order. Among them was Khwaja Burhanuddin Gharib, who would establish the Chishti silsila at Khuldabad, near Daulatabad, in the years immediately after 1327. From that hospice, over the next century, the Chishti tradition spread across the entire Deccan plateau.

The pattern is one of transplantation through orthodox channels. The Sufis who came south were not popular preachers or itinerant healers; they were trained scholars, with formal ijazas (licenses of teaching), bringing with them complete madrasa libraries, established devotional protocols, and chains of teachers that they were determined to preserve. The Deccan, when they arrived, had a thousand-year-old Hindu and Buddhist religious culture but no settled Sunni Sufi establishment. Within three generations there was one — in Khuldabad, in Gulbarga, in Bidar, and after 1500, in every successor sultanate's capital.

The Sufism of the Deccan in the twenty-first century is what it has been since the fourteenth: a discipline of the heart, organised around the silsilas, transmitted through teacher-disciple chains, anchored in the dargahs of the saints whose lives this page records. Operation Polo in 1948 ended the Asaf Jahi state but not the religious institutions it had patronised; the dargahs at Gulbarga, Khuldabad, Hyderabad, Bijapur and Aurangabad continue under the same forms of administration (the sajjada-nashin, the hereditary custodian; the 'urs, the annual gathering on the saint's death-anniversary; the daily congregational prayers, qawwali sessions and langar) that have governed them since the medieval period.

The 'urs calendar of the Deccan is a near-monthly cycle of pilgrimage: the 'urs of Khwaja Bandanawaz at Gulbarga in Dhu'l-Qa'da, drawing several hundred thousand pilgrims; the 'urs of Yousufain Sharif at Hyderabad on the 11th of Rabi al-Thani; the gatherings at Khuldabad through the cool months for Burhanuddin Gharib and Zayn al-Din Shirazi; the local 'urs of Shah Khamosh, Mahbub Subhani, and dozens of smaller saints at their hospices and tombs through Telangana, Karnataka and Marathwada. The qawwals — the singers of devotional verse — still sing the Persian and Dakhni couplets of Khusrau, Bandanawaz and Bedil at these gatherings, in continuity with their seventh-century repertoire.

The scholarly transmission has continued too. The Jami'a Nizamia at Hyderabad (founded 1876) is the principal seminary of the Deccan; its curriculum combines classical Hanafi fiqh and the dars-i-nizami with Qadiri and Naqshbandi Sufi training in the manner the Deccan saints themselves taught. The Sajjada-Nashins of the major dargahs hold positions of communal religious authority; their formal training is in hadith, fiqh and tafsir as well as in Sufi practice. The two sides of the Hadith of Jibreel — Islam and Ihsan — continue, in the Deccan as in every other classical Islamic landscape, to be taught together.