On May 25, 1995, at the end of a two-month-long siege, the shrine and tomb complex (astān) of Nund Rishi (1378–1440), Kashmir's most revered Sufi and the founder of a fifteenth-century Kashmiri Sufi order called the Rishi Order, was destroyed in a gun battle between the militants of the Ḥizb al-Mujahidīn, a pro-Pakistan Kashmiri guerilla group, and the Indian Army. The Ḥizb al-Mujahidīn and the Indian Army kept accusing each other of destroying one of the most popular Sufi shrines of Kashmir even as most Kashmiris retreated into shocked silence and mourning. The gratuitous destruction of a revered Sufi shrine, a center of Kashmiri Rishism, epitomized the everyday fate of Kashmiris in the early 1990s at the receiving end of a low-intensity war between India and the different Kashmiri nationalist, pro-Pakistan, and Islamist groups over the future of the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The central Kashmir town of Chrar was also destroyed in the gun battle. The shrine at Chrar symbolized the distinctive history of Islam in Kashmir for some (in a less academic and more political variant, it was seen as a symbol of the multireligious, even syncretic, Kashmīriyat, or Kashmiriness) and the beginnings of Islam and Islamic culture in Kashmir for the others. But for most Kashmiris, the shrine evoked the everyday life of faith in Kashmir across different religious traditions. The Chrar shrine was, and remains, clearly one of the most sacred religious spaces for Kashmiris and one of the few that commands respect across the sectarian divide. It is no surprise then that the pro-independence Kashmiri nationalists (as well as Kashmiri nationalists who are pro-India), pro-Pakistan Islamists (as well as the supposedly “apolitical” Islamists), and the Indian state (with its official ideology of secularism at the cornerstone of its claim on Kashmir) all lay claim to Chrar as a center of Rishi thinking and philosophy. For the Kashmiri nationalists (secessionist or subnationalist), the Rishi thinking and philosophy is the Kashmiri way of life. For the Islamists, the Rishi thinking and philosophy is merely the precursor of a pure Islamic culture that is yet to be fully instituted. But neither the Kashmiri nationalists nor the Kashmiri Islamists have articulated any serious understanding of the religio-political movement of the saint who lies buried at Chrar.