The tariqa is the Sufi order considered as an organised body, and the word names both a method of spiritual training and the institution that transmits it.
A path with a structure
At its root the word means a way or path, the method of purification and remembrance by which the disciple is led toward God, but it came to denote the organised order that carries a particular method: a chain of masters, a rule of life, a distinctive litany, a rite of initiation, and, historically, a lodge in which the members gathered. The order gives the individual quest an institutional form, so that a seeker does not improvise a path but is admitted to an existing one under a living guide.
From lodge to network
From roughly the twelfth century the orders crystallised around the reputations of great masters and spread as networks across the Islamic world, each with its litanies, its lineage and its houses, and for centuries they were among the principal institutions of Muslim social and devotional life. Modern reform movements and secular states have been hostile to them in many places, banning the orders outright in republican Turkey and curtailing them elsewhere, yet they persist widely, and the tariqa remains the ordinary vehicle through which Sufism is practised as a communal rather than a solitary discipline.