The Silsila Tree — Dakhni.org

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RootThe Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

Companions'Ali ibn Abi Talib · Abu Bakr al-Siddiq

SilsilasChishti · Qadiri · Suhrawardi · Naqshbandi

Saints tracedSeven

SeatsKhuldabad · Gulbarga · Pahadi Sharif · Hyderabad

Span632 CE → the 18th century

The Shajara The Chains◆The Tree◆Reading the Tree

I · The Chains

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.

II · The Tree

From the Prophet ﷺ to the Deccan

The tree opens at the founders of the orders. Use the bar at the top of the chart — or the button below — to reveal the earlier generations, up to the Companions and the Prophet ﷺ.

✦ Saint of this archive — opens his record Founder of a silsila Documented, unnamed links · family descent Qadiri Suhrawardi Chishti Hamadani line Naqshbandi

Drag or scroll sideways to travel across the tree · use the circle beneath a card to fold or unfold its successors

The chains, in brief (the interactive tree needs JavaScript):

Chishti — Khwaja Mu'inuddin Chishti of Ajmer → Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki → Baba Farid of Pakpattan → Nizamuddin Awliya → Burhanuddin Gharib of Khuldabad; and Nizamuddin Awliya → Nasir al-Din Chiragh-i-Delhi → Bandanawaz Gisudaraz of Gulbarga.

Qadiri — Shaykh 'Abd al-Qadir Jilani of Baghdad → (documented chain) → Sayyid Yusuf al-Husayni of Bidar → Shah Raju Qattal of Hyderabad → his descendants, the Yousufain brothers and the Mahbub Subhani line.

Suhrawardi — Shaykh Shihab al-Din 'Umar al-Suhrawardi of Baghdad → Baha al-Din Zakariya of Multan → (documented chain) → Baba Sharfuddin of Pahadi Sharif.

Hamadani line — the family of Sayyid 'Ali al-Hamadhani of Kashmir → Hussain Shah Wali of Hyderabad.

Naqshbandi — Khwaja Baha al-Din Naqshband of Bukhara → (brought south by Mughal-era scholars) → the Naqshbandi-Qadiri line of Hyderabad → Shah Khamosh.

Reading the Tree

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 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.