Chishti Order

A journalist, Qur'anic commentator and political thinker who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941. His six-volume Urdu commentary Tafhim al-Qur'an and his writings on the Islamic state were among the most widely circulated Muslim political works of the twentieth century.

A hadith scholar of Mazahir Uloom Saharanpur who taught for over fifty years and wrote a six-volume Arabic commentary on Malik's Muwatta. His Urdu devotional tracts, collected as the Faza'il series, became the standard reading of the Tablighi Jamaat.

Four Sufi orders shaped religious life in the Indian subcontinent: the Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Suhrawardi. This article traces how they functioned there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how initiation into several orders at once weakened the identity of each.