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 this effort, he became known as Mujaddid Alf-i thani: “renewer of the second millennium.”
Due to the significance of his reforms to the Naqshbandi teachings, his spiritual descendants became known as a new order, the Mujaddidi. Their teachings became popular throughout the Indian subcontinent, and spread eventually to the Caucasus, the Middle East, Asia Minor and beyond.
