Murshid

The murshid is the spiritual director of a Sufi order, the master who initiates a disciple, prescribes the discipline, and corrects the disciple along the path.

The office of guidance

The murshid, also called the sheikh or pir, receives the disciple pledge, initiates him into the order, prescribes the litany and the practices of remembrance, and oversees his inward progress, correcting his faults and guiding him through the states and stations of the path, so the office is one of intimate and authoritative spiritual direction. The bond between master and disciple is the heart of the Sufi way, and the murshid is held to guide the seeker through experiences and dangers that he could not safely navigate alone, which is why the tradition insists so strongly on the necessity of a guide.

Authority through the chain

The authority of the murshid rests on his own initiation and training within the chain of transmission of the order, the silsila reaching back through his own masters to the founder and the Prophet, so that he is himself a link in the line and passes on what he received, and the right to guide and to initiate is transmitted through that chain. The office thus depends on lineage as well as on personal attainment. The murshid is the counterpart of the murid, the disciple, and the relationship between them, of guide and guided, master and seeker, is the fundamental structure of the Sufi order and the means by which its path is walked.

The great historical Sufi orders each take their structure and their distinctive practices from a founding murshid whose name the order still carries: the Qadiriyya from Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani in twelfth century Baghdad, the Naqshbandi order from a line reaching to Baha-ud-Din Naqshband in fourteenth century Central Asia, and the Chishti order, especially influential in South Asia, from Moinuddin Chishti, whose shrine in Ajmer remains a major pilgrimage site. Each order transmits its own specific litany and method through its own line of murshids descending from that founder, so the content of the guidance a murshid gives varies by order even though the basic master-disciple structure is shared across them all.

The whole relationship has also drawn sustained theological criticism from Salafi and Wahhabi currents within Sunni Islam, which regard the degree of reverence some Sufi orders direct toward a living or deceased murshid, including practices at shrine tombs, as bordering on or crossing into shirk, associating another being with God's own unique authority, a doctrinal objection that has translated in some countries into the physical destruction of Sufi shrines and continues to make the murshid relationship a genuinely contested rather than universally accepted feature of Sunni Islam.