An Order Assembled After the Man

The Qadiriyya is generally called the oldest of the Sufi orders and is certainly among the most widely spread, with branches from Morocco to Indonesia and a very large presence in West Africa. What it is not is an organisation Abd al-Qadir founded. J. Spencer Trimingham's account of the orders is explicit that the Qadiriyya took shape after his death, assembled by his sons and by later teachers who traced their chain of transmission back to him, and that the process by which a teaching circle becomes an order with a rule, a hierarchy and a lineage happened across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries generally rather than in one act.

This is the ordinary pattern rather than an exception, and it is worth stating because the language of foundation obscures it. A Sufi order is a lineage, and lineages are drawn backwards. The founder is identified by those who claim him.

His tomb in Baghdad, in the quarter that carries his name, has been a centre of visitation for eight centuries and is the anchor of the order's geography. It also sits inside the dispute this atlas records under the wali: shrine visitation is exactly the practice that currents from Ibn Taymiyya onward have rejected, and the Qadiriyya has been among the institutions most directly affected by that argument in the modern period. In parts of West Africa the order is a mass institution with a social reach a medieval Baghdadi preacher could not have imagined, and in other places its shrines have been attacked.