The Naqshbandiyya carried its Central Asian origin into Mughal India, where the order found its most consequential later reformer in Ahmad Sirhindi, who worked in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to pull Naqshbandi practice, and Indian Islam more broadly, away from what he saw as dangerous syncretism encouraged under Emperor Akbar's religiously eclectic court.
Sirhindi founded a distinct branch, the Mujaddidi Naqshbandiyya, built around a stricter adherence to Islamic law alongside Sufi practice, and this reforming, law minded character became one of the order's recurring features across the following centuries, distinguishing it from orders more associated with ecstatic or musical devotion.
The Naqshbandiyya's reach continued to widen long after Sirhindi, spreading through the Ottoman lands, the Caucasus and eventually the West, where the Naqshbandi Haqqani branch, led by Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani in the twentieth century, established a significant following in Europe and North America, carrying an order rooted in fourteenth century Bukhara into a genuinely global, modern setting while still tracing its authority through the same unbroken chain running back through Abu Bakr rather than Ali.