On a river island at Saraguri Chapori, north of Sivasagar, stands the dargah of the saint the Assamese call Ajan Pir, the resting place of Azan Faqir, who gave the valley the Zikir and shaped a distinctly Assamese Islam. The shrine has a remarkable reach, for Muslims and Hindus alike come to it and its annual urs draws people of every faith, the saint buried here being remembered as a unifier as much as a preacher.
The saint from Baghdad, the Zikir and the blinding
By tradition Ajan Pir was a Sufi sayyid named Shah Miran. He came to Assam from the west in the seventeenth century, by most accounts around 1630. The standard account says he came from Baghdad, though some traditions place his origin elsewhere in the north. He settled in the Ahom country near the capital. He is said to have built a small mosque. He called the azan so movingly that people named him for it: Azan Faqir, the faqir of the call to prayer. His lasting gift was the Zikir. These are devotional songs in Assamese that carried Islamic piety in the idiom of the valley. They form a body of folk-religious verse that stands beside the Vaishnava and Shakta song traditions of the land. The chronicles preserve a darker episode. A jealous official poisoned the Ahom king's mind against him. The saint was blinded on a false charge of spying for the Mughals. The remorseful king then made him a land grant at Saraguri Chapori, where the dargah now stands.
A shrine for all faiths
What makes the dargah remarkable is the breadth of those who come to it. Azan Faqir is remembered not as the saint of one community. He is remembered as a figure who knit Islam into the common religious life of the valley. His shrine draws Hindus alongside Muslims. Its annual urs is a gathering of people of every faith, in the manner of Hajo across the state. That reach rests on the Zikir, the body of Assamese-language devotional songs he is held to have composed. These songs carried the message of Islam in the same village idiom as the Vaishnava and Shakta song of the land. So his piety reached people in a tongue and a tune they already knew. The saint could be blinded on a false charge and then honoured with a royal land-grant. His songs are sung by Muslim and Hindu alike. He is the clearest single emblem of the distinctively Assamese Islam that grew up in the valley, and the dargah at Saraguri Chapori is its principal monument.
Visiting
The dargah is about 22 kilometres from Sivasagar town. It lies out on the Saraguri Chapori, the river-island and sandbar country along the Brahmaputra. So the last stretch runs over chapori tracks whose state turns with the river. The dry cool months are the dependable time to go. In the wet season, the exact crossing is best checked locally. It is at its fullest during the annual urs, when pilgrims of every faith gather from across Assam. It pairs naturally with the Ahom tank-and-temple monuments of Sivasagar town. That makes the dargah the Islamic stop on a loop that traces the many faiths of the old kingdom.