Baha al-Din was born in 1318 in a village near Bukhara and died there in 1389, and he did not travel far beyond Transoxiana. The order named after him did.
It moved first through Central Asia, where Khwaja Ahrar in the fifteenth century made it a political force at the Timurid court in Samarkand, holding no office and directing a great deal. It went south into India, where Ahmad Sirhindi in the early seventeenth century founded the Mujaddidi branch that became the dominant Sufi presence in the subcontinent. It went west into Anatolia and the Ottoman lands, and in the nineteenth century the Khalidi branch, from Khalid al-Baghdadi, spread through Kurdistan, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Naqshbandi shaykhs led the long resistance to Russian expansion in Daghestan and Chechnya, which is a direct consequence of an order whose members stay in public life.
The shrine at Qasr-i Arifan outside Bukhara was a major place of visiting through all of it, and remained one through the Soviet period in a reduced and unofficial form. It was rebuilt and reopened after 1991 and is now the busiest religious site in Uzbekistan, visited by many people who would not describe themselves as Sufis at all, which is the ordinary condition of a shrine that has been standing for six hundred years.