About the Book: Indians At Herods Gate: A Jerusalem Tale
Eight hundred years ago Baba Farid, the great Sufi saint of the Chisti order,
visited Jerusalem, freshly wrested back for Islam from the Crusaders by Saladin,
and meditated there for forty days in an underground room. Later, an Indian
Hospice was born through a waqf endowment around that room and has welcomed
Indian pilgrims-and soldiers-to Jerusalem ever since. For close to a century,
through the tumultuous years of the British Mandate, the Second World War, the
birth of Israel and the ensuing decades of conflict, the Hospice has been looked
after by an Indian family-first by Sheikh