Meher Ali Shah

Pir Meher Ali Shah (14 April 1859 – 11 May 1937) was a Punjabi Muslim Sufi scholar and mystic poet from Punjab, British India (present-day Pakistan). Belonging to the Chishti order, he is known as a Hanafi scholar who led the anti-Ahmadiyya movement, and he composed poetry in Punjabi and wrote several books in Urdu and Persian.¹ The Urdu article dates his birth at Golra Sharif to 14 April 1859, corresponding to 1 Ramadan 1275 AH.²

He received his early religious education at a khanqah school and attended classes in Urdu and Persian at the local madrasa; after completing his education at Angah at the age of fifteen, he pursued higher studies across India — Lucknow, Rampur, Kanpur, Aligarh, Bhui and Saharanpur — staying two and a half years at Aligarh at the madrasa of Lutfullah.¹

He was a disciple and khalifa of Khawaja Shams-ud-din Sialvi of Sial Sharif in the Silsila-e-Chishtia Nizamiyah, and his biography Meher-e-Muneer records that he was also made a khalifa by Haji Imdadullah, when he visited the latter in Mecca.¹ The Urdu article gives the initiation in the order's own terms: he took bay'ah at Sialvi's hand in the Chishtiyya Nizamiya Sulaymaniya and was granted khilafa.²

He was a supporter of Ibn Arabi's doctrine of Wahdat-ul-Wujood, while making a distinction between the Creator and creation, and he was an authority on Ibn Arabi's Meccan Illuminations; in 1933 Muhammad Iqbal wrote to him from the context of a Cambridge lecture on Ibn Arabi's concept of space and time, saying there was now nobody in all Hindustan whom he could consult in this matter, though the Shah's meditation and ill health prevented a reply.¹ His best-known book is Saif-e-Chishtiyai ("The Sword of the Chishti Order"), a polemical work against the Ahmadiyya movement of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad; among his lesser-known works is Tasfiah Mabain Sunni wa Shi'ah, a Persian treatise setting out the doctrinal distinctions between Sunni and Shia while aiming to reduce sectarian animosity.¹ In 1903 he inaugurated Rawalpindi's historic Markazi Jamia Masjid, built as a symbol of Muslim unity, alongside the deposed Afghan king Ayub Khan.¹

In Safar 1356 AH (April 1937) he fell ill with a cold that developed into typhoid fever, and he died on the morning of 29 Safar — 11 May 1937 — at Golra Sharif, where his tomb stands.¹² His three-day urs is held every year from 27 to 29 Safar and draws thousands of devotees from across Pakistan; Pakistan Post issued a commemorative stamp for him in its Sufi saints series in 2013, and the Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University in Rawalpindi is named after him.¹

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