In the context of Sufi tradition, the term 'khanqah' stood for:
- A.the Hell
- B.a graveyard
- C.a hospice
- D.the Heaven
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is C, a hospice. A khanqah was the hospice or lodge where a Sufi master lived with his disciples, taught, held assemblies of devotional music and fed whoever came to the door, whatever their faith or caste. It was the working centre of a silsila, and the Chishti khanqahs at Ajmer, Delhi and Ajodhan drew visitors of every background, which is why they mattered so much to the social history of the Sultanate period. Option A and option D are wrong because the words for heaven and hell in this vocabulary are jannat and jahannum, not khanqah. Option B is wrong because the tomb of a Sufi saint is called a dargah, and the death anniversary observed there is the urs. Students should also remember jamaat khana for a larger community hall and sama for the musical assembly held inside the khanqah.
Read the full article: Bhakti and Sufi Movements: Saints, Orders and Ideas
Practice Questions
View allWhich Sufi saint was called 'Mahbub-i-Ilahi'?
- A.Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti
- B.Baba Farid
- C.Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki
- D.Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya
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Mahbub-i-Ilahi means the beloved of God, and it is the title by which this Chishti master of Delhi has been known for seven centuries.
Read the full explanation →Amir Khosrow was a royal poet and a disciple of which of the following Sufi saints?
- A.Fariduddin Ganjshakar
- B.Syed Muhammad Nizamuddin Auliya
- C.Shaikh Salim Chisti
- D.Muhammad Maharavi
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Amir Khusrau served as a poet at the courts of several Delhi Sultans, but his spiritual allegiance was to Nizamuddin Auliya, and he was buried beside his master.
Read the full explanation →Which Sikh Guru gave the idea of the Gurmukhi script?
- A.Guru Angad Dev
- B.Guru Amar Das
- C.Guru Ram Das
- D.Guru Nanak Dev
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The second Guru standardised and popularised Gurmukhi, the script in which the hymns of the Gurus were written down, and this made it possible to preserve the teaching of the movement in the language its followers actually spoke.
Read the full explanation →The Alvar saints of the Tamil country were devotees of which deity?
- A.Shiva
- B.Vishnu
- C.Surya
- D.Shakti
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The Alvars were the twelve Vaishnava saint-poets of the Tamil country, active roughly between the sixth and the ninth centuries, whose hymns were later gathered as the Divya Prabandham and sung in temples.
Read the full explanation →Who propounded the philosophy of Advaita or non-dualism?
- A.Ramanujacharya
- B.Madhvacharya
- C.Shankaracharya
- D.Vallabhacharya
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Writing in the eighth century, he argued that Brahman alone is real, that the individual soul is not different from Brahman, and that the world as ordinarily perceived is the work of maya; this is Advaita, non-dualism.
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