From the Khwajagan to a Transcontinental Order

The Abu Bakr silsila did not originate with the order's formal founder; it descends through a series of Central Asian teachers known collectively as the Khwajagan, the masters, active in and around Bukhara from the eleventh century onward, before Baha ad-Din Naqshband, who died in 1389, gave the line the organized form and the name it carries today. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records that Naqshband himself insisted his teaching restated instruction already present among the Khwajagan rather than an innovation of his own, a claim consistent with the order's wider insistence that its authority rests on unbroken transmission rather than on any single founder's originality. From its Central Asian base the order spread with unusual reach: it took root across the Ottoman Empire, was carried into Mughal India where the reformer Ahmad Sirhindi built a distinct branch of it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and later reached the North Caucasus, where Naqshbandi affiliation shaped resistance to Russian expansion in the nineteenth century under leaders including Imam Shamil. Scholarship on Sufism in Russia and Central Asia treats this geographic range, from Bukhara to Istanbul to Delhi to the Caucasus, as unusual among the tariqas, attributing it partly to the order's emphasis on sober, this worldly engagement rather than withdrawal, which let Naqshbandi teachers move comfortably among rulers, scholars and, when required, armies.