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The Orders
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The Silsilah of this Order
Sufi teaching proceeds by means of a teacher-student relationship. Each teacher-student relationship forms a link in a chain which connects any authentic Sufi Order back to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). This chain of initiation or silsilah is called the Lineage Tree…
Hazrat Azad Rasool (r.a.)
Hazrat Azad Rasool (r.a.) was born in the town of Kankroli in Udaipur, India, in 1920. From the childhood, he displayed a strong interest in spiritual pursuits. His developing mind quickly became preoccupied with esoteric questions: “Is there some power…
Hazrat Hamid Hasan Alawi (r.a)
Hazrat Hafiz Hamid Hasan (r.a.) was born in 1871-72 in Azamgarh. His father was Mian Karim Bakhsh (r.a.), a disciple of the Chishti Shaykh Mawlana Nijabet Ali Shah (r.a). His mother too was spiritually inclined and a murida of the…
Hazrat Sayyid Abdul Bari Shah (r.a.)
Hazrat Sayyid Abdul Bari Shah (r.a.) was a great saint and a truly universal being (insan-i-kamil). Over time, his importance and his contribution to Sufic thought and action is being more and more recognized throughout the world. Hazrat Sayyid Abdul…
The Shadhili Order
The Shadhili order takes its name from Shaykh Abu’l-Hassan ash-Shadhili (1196/1197 – 1258 CE). He was born in Ghumara, near Cueta in northern Morocco into a family of peasant labourers. He studied the principles of Islamic Law (fiqh) at the…
The Qadiri Order
Shaykh Abd al-Qadir Jilani, born in 1077 C.E. in Jilan, Iran, mastered the scholarly disciplines of Islam before dedicating himself to austerities and spiritual studies as a young man. Eventually he settled in Baghdad (then the capital of the Muslim…
The Chishti Order
The Chishti order was founded by Shaykh Abu Is’haq (d. 940 or 966). A native of Syria, Shaykh Abu Is’haq was sent by his spiritual guide to teach in the town of Chisht (near Heart, Afghanistan). The order he established…
The Mujaddidi Order
At the end of the sixteenth century, the Indian Shaykh Ahmad Faruqi Sirhindi (d.1624) of the Naqshbandi Order reaffirmed the importance of shari’ah in an effort to counteract the spread of un-Islamic practices among India’s Muslim and Sufi circles. For…
The Naqshbandi Order
The Naqshbandi order stems from the Silsilah Khwajagan, which originally developed in Turkestan. The best known Shaykhs of the Khwajagan were Khwajah Ahmed Yasawi (r.a.) (d. about 1167 C.E.), a native of Sayram in Kazakhstan and Khwajah ‘Abdul al-Khaliq Ghujdawani…
