Baha al-Din Naqshband was born in 1318 in a village a short distance from Bukhara, then one of the great cities of Central Asian Islamic learning, and he did not invent the discipline that came to bear his name so much as give an existing one its lasting form. He trained under a line of masters known collectively as the Khwajagan, the masters, whose practice already emphasised inward attentiveness over outward display, and from them, transmitted through his own teachers Muhammad Baba Sammasi and Amir Kulal, he inherited a method that set his line apart from most other Sufi paths of his day: dhikr, ritual remembrance of God, performed silently rather than spoken aloud, chanted or accompanied by movement.
He spent much of his later life in and around Bukhara, teaching until his death there in 1389, and it was after his death that his students organised and named the order for him, a common pattern in the history of Sufi orders in which an eponymous founder gives his name to a school shaped as much by successors as by himself.
One further mark set the order apart from its rivals. Where most Sufi lineages trace their chain of spiritual authority, the silsila, back to the Prophet through Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Naqshbandi silsila runs instead through Abu Bakr, the Prophet's closest companion and the first of the four rightly guided caliphs, a difference of real significance in a tradition where lineage is itself a claim to authority.