Baha al-Din Naqshband

The Naqshbandi way is defined more by what it excludes than by what it adds. There is no music in the gathering and no dance, the remembrance is silent rather than voiced, and the law is observed strictly rather than transcended. The path is described as beginning at the end, meaning that the states other orders arrive at after long practice are taken as the starting discipline.

The eleven principles the order works from are the eight of Abd al-Khaliq Ghijduwani, an earlier master of the Khwajagan, with three added by Baha al-Din. They are terse instructions about attention: awareness in the breath, watching the step, journeying in the homeland, and solitude in the crowd, khalwat dar anjuman, which is the one usually quoted. It means that the retreat other paths make by withdrawing is to be made inwardly while remaining in the market, so that the hand is at work and the heart is with God.

The result is a Sufism that fits a working urban population and does not look strange from the outside. That has a great deal to do with why the order was tolerated where louder practice was not, and why it recruited scholars and officials as readily as artisans. It also explains the recurring Naqshbandi involvement in politics, since a discipline that does not require withdrawal leaves its adherents inside public life.

Baha al-Din was born in 1318 in a village near Bukhara and died there in 1389, and he did not travel far beyond Transoxiana. The order named after him did.

It moved first through Central Asia, where Khwaja Ahrar in the fifteenth century made it a political force at the Timurid court in Samarkand, holding no office and directing a great deal. It went south into India, where Ahmad Sirhindi in the early seventeenth century founded the Mujaddidi branch that became the dominant Sufi presence in the subcontinent. It went west into Anatolia and the Ottoman lands, and in the nineteenth century the Khalidi branch, from Khalid al-Baghdadi, spread through Kurdistan, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Naqshbandi shaykhs led the long resistance to Russian expansion in Daghestan and Chechnya, which is a direct consequence of an order whose members stay in public life.

The shrine at Qasr-i Arifan outside Bukhara was a major place of visiting through all of it, and remained one through the Soviet period in a reduced and unofficial form. It was rebuilt and reopened after 1991 and is now the busiest religious site in Uzbekistan, visited by many people who would not describe themselves as Sufis at all, which is the ordinary condition of a shrine that has been standing for six hundred years.