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Sayyid Mīr ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Maʿṣūm ʿAlī Shāh Dakanī (b. c. 1147/1734–5, d. end twelfth/eighteenth century) was an Indian-born spiritual master of the Niʿmatallāhī Ṣūfī order who revived Niʿmatallāhī Ṣūf…

Riḍā ʿAlī Shāh Dakanī (b. c.1142–3/1730, d. 1214/1799–1800) was the last of the Deccan-based aqṭāb (lit., poles, that is, heads of the order; Ar. pl. of quṭb) in the Niʿmatallāhī Ṣūfī order, as recognised in the salāsil (“chains” of spiritual authority, Ar. pl. of silsila) of its current branches (Gramlich, 1:27–57). The leadership of the Niʿmatallāhī order had been transferred from Persia to the Deccan in the first half of the ninth/fifteenth century (Algar, Niʿmat-Allāhiyya, 46), and would return there thanks to Riḍā ʿAlī Shāh (the Niʿmatallāhiyya, historically influential in Central Asia and India but today mostly in Iran, with significant groups in western Europe, goes back to Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī (d. 843/1431), a Syrian-born Iranian mystic and author who settled in Kirmān, in southeastern Iran). Riḍā ʿAlī Shāh, also referred to as Shāh ʿAlī Riḍā (Shirvānī, 196), was born probably about 1142–3/1730 in Hyderabad. Sulṭānī-Gunābādī (204) rejects as implausible the commonly cited sources, compiled in Iran, asserting that the master lived for one hundred twenty years (e.g., Shīrāzī, 167), or even one hundred forty years (Hidāyat, 438). Given the consensus over the approximate dates of death (see below), his birth can be placed in the second half of the eleventh/seventeenth century. Sulṭānī-Gunābādī refers instead to Ghulām ʿAlī Qādirī’s Mishkat-i nubuvvat (“The niche for the…