WSJ Photo Journal: Sufi Anniversary

Photo © Deepak Sharma/AP-All Rights Reserved
The WSJ's Photo Journal has featured the above photograph by Deepak Sharma (AP) of Pakistani pilgrims carrying an offering of embroidered cloth (which I believe is called kiswa) to cover the tomb of Sufi saint Khawaja Moinuddin Chisti on the anniversary of his birth in Ajmer, India.

I should have been there!!! My kind of event!

Shaikh Khawaja Syed Muhammad Moinuddin Chisti was the most famous Sufi saint of the Chishti Order of the Indian Subcontinent. He introduced and established the order in South Asia, and was succeeded by various notable saints such as Nizzam Uddin Auliya.

I've never checked on this, but Khawaja in Egyptian Arabic means "foreigner", and was used as a title for all Greek and Italian residents (as an example) in Egypt, so I'm not sure if there's a connection or not. Wikipedia defines Khawaja as a title used by South Asians, which is possibly related to Khoja as well.

Matthieu Paley: The Pamir Mountains

Here's a 6 minutes trailer from a multimedia documentary "Forgotten on the Roof of the World" by photographer Matthieu Paley and anthropologist Ted Callahan that tells the story of a little-known tribe of Kirghiz nomads in one of earth’s most remote regions - Afghanistan’s High Pamirs mountains.

The full documentary will be screened by Matthieu at the Royal Geographical Society (Hong Kong) on Tuesday 22nd of June.

Matthieu Paley is an Asia-based (currently based in Hong Kong) photographer specializing in editorial and documentary photography. His work appeared in Geo, National Geographic, Newsweek, Time, Outside, Discovery and various others.