Home›Sufism in the Deccan›The Silsila Tree
Seven saints, one tree
Every saint recorded in this archive stood inside a chain of masters — and every chain ascends to the same root.
A Sufi's authority is documentary. Each of the seven saints whose lives this archive records held a formal place in a silsila — a chain of teachers in which each master licensed his successor by khilafat, link by link, back through the founder of the order and the generations before him to the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ and to the Prophet ﷺ himself. To ask "who was this saint's master?" is therefore always answerable, and the answers connect: Burhanuddin Gharib and Bandanawaz Gisudaraz meet two links apart in the hospice of Nizamuddin Awliya; Shah Raju Qattal and the Yousufain brothers stand on one Qadiri stem; and all of the chains, followed far enough upward, converge.
The chart below assembles those chains — exactly as each saint's own record on this site documents them — into a single tree, or shajara. The gold cards are the seven saints of this archive; selecting one opens his full record. The filled, coloured cards are the founders of the four classical silsilas of the Deccan — Chishti, Qadiri, Suhrawardi and Naqshbandi — with a fifth, slate-coloured line for the Hamadani family descent of Hussain Shah Wali. Dashed connectors mark links the records document but do not name, or descent by family rather than formal khilafat.
Five chains at once make a wide chart. Use the row of chips above the chart to read one silsila at a time; the zoom, fit and full-screen controls sit in the corners of the chart itself.
From the Prophet ﷺ to the Deccan
The tree opens at the founders of the orders. Use the button in the top-left of the chart to reveal the earlier generations, up to the Companions and the Prophet ﷺ.
Drag the chart to travel across it · the circle beneath a card folds or unfolds its successors · + − zoom, 0 fit, F full screen, Esc to leave it
This shajara is drawn strictly from the seven saint records of this archive and the Sufism index page; it introduces no names or dates beyond them. A solid line is a master-to-disciple (or master-to-khalifa) relation named in the records — comparable, as the index page notes, to a hadith chain of transmission (isnad). A dashed line marks either links the records document but do not name — as between 'Abd al-Qadir Jilani and Sayyid Yusuf al-Husayni of Bidar, or in the Multan chain above Baba Sharfuddin — or descent by family rather than formal khilafat, as with the Yousufain brothers from Shah Raju Qattal and Hussain Shah Wali from the family of 'Ali al-Hamadhani. Shah Raju Qattal's record documents two separate threads back to Baghdad, and the tree shows both: his initiatic chain, which passes through Sayyid Yusuf al-Husayni of Bidar and forms his line of descent in the chart, and his Husayni Sayyid ancestry, which runs through Sayyid Hamza, the spiritual brother of Sayyid Muhammad Gisudaraz, and is drawn as a separate dashed arrow into his card. The records do not place these two threads in any order relative to one another, so the tree does not either. Shah Khamosh belonged to the combined Naqshbandi-Qadiri silsila characteristic of early Asaf Jahi Hyderabad; the tree places him on the Naqshbandi stem, which by the classical reckoning ascends through Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, while the other chains ascend through 'Ali ibn Abi Talib. The generations between the Companions and the founders of the orders are shown condensed.
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