Alongside its original political use, the same hand clasped in hand pledge became, within Sufi orders, the act by which a seeker formally becomes a disciple, murid, of a living master, shaykh, committing to follow that teacher's guidance within a particular order, tariqa. Each order traces its authority through a chain of transmission, a silsila, understood to run master to master back to the Prophet, and the disciple's pledge is presented as joining that chain rather than entering an informal arrangement with one individual.
What the pledge specifically obligates the disciple to, and what instruction or practice follows from it, is treated by many orders as internal to the relationship between a shaykh and the disciples under that shaykh's direct guidance, a matter of the order's own governance rather than material meant for outside description, and this account accordingly does not attempt to lay out what any particular order's post pledge instruction involves. Access to a given shaykh's guidance, and to whatever a given order restricts to initiated disciples, is governed entirely by that order's own structure and the shaykh's own judgment about a seeker's readiness, which varies considerably from one Sufi order to another and is not a matter this entry can generalize about.