Wahdat al-shuhud, the unity of witnessing, is most closely associated with Ahmad Sirhindi, a seventeenth century Naqshbandi Sufi in Mughal India who proposed it as a corrective to wahdat al-wujud. Sirhindi argued that the sense of absolute unity a mystic experiences at the height of contemplation is real as an experience of the mystic's own consciousness but should not be mistaken for a metaphysical claim about the actual structure of being.
On his account, the mystic witnesses unity, shuhud, because the created intellect, dazzled by God's overwhelming reality, temporarily loses the capacity to perceive multiplicity, not because multiplicity has ceased to exist or because creation and Creator genuinely share one being. This reframing let Sirhindi affirm the intensity of the Sufi mystical experience that wahdat al-wujud was trying to describe while preserving what he saw as the Quran's clear distinction between an eternal, transcendent God and a contingent, created world, a distinction he believed wahdat al-wujud, taken literally, put at risk. Sirhindi wrote extensively on the distinction in his collected letters, the Maktubat, which circulated widely among Naqshbandi Sufis in India, Central Asia and the Ottoman lands and became a central reference point for the order's later teaching.