From a Punjab Reformer to the Ottoman Naqshbandiyya

Sirhindi reached this position from inside the Naqshbandi order itself, having joined it at the age of thirty six under the master Khwaja Baqi Billah, and his reformulation went on to define an entire branch of the order that still carries his name. His followers called the movement he founded the Mujaddidi branch of the Naqshbandiyya, and it spread first through his own extensive correspondence, hundreds of letters sent to disciples and to figures at the Mughal court, later gathered and circulated as a body of teaching in their own right. His son, Khwaja Muhammad Masum, continued the mission after him and personally tutored the future emperor Aurangzeb, giving the Mujaddidi reform direct influence at the highest level of Mughal government within a generation of Sirhindi's own death. The teaching did not stay confined to India. Sirhindi's letters were translated into Turkish and carried the Mujaddidi reform into Naqshbandi communities across the Ottoman Empire, where wahdat al shuhud took root as a live alternative to the wujudi reading Ibn al Arabi's own school had spread through the same Sufi networks centuries earlier. The rivalry between the two positions has never fully resolved within Sufism generally, and contemporary Naqshbandi Mujaddidi communities still identify Sirhindi's correction as one of the order's defining contributions to Islamic thought.