Central Asian Sufism

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Central Asian Sufism is the body of Islamic mystical practice that took shape in the Turco-Persian lands east of Iran — Transoxiana, Khurasan, and the steppe fringe — and which gave Islam two of its most far-reaching brotherhoods. It is less a single doctrine than a regional lineage of masters and the orders that formed around them.

Among the earliest of these was Ahmad Yasawi, an eleventh- or twelfth-century teacher of the Turkestan grasslands whose followers became the Yasawiyya. Tied to him is a collection of devotional verses, the Dīwān-i Ḥikmat or “Book of Wisdom,” composed in a Turkic vernacular rather than the Persian or Arabic of the learned class; whether the surviving poems are Yasawi’s own is disputed, but their plain Turkic carried Sufi piety to populations the scholarly tradition had not reached. The Yasawiyya practised a loud, vocal dhikr — the rhythmic remembrance of the names of God — and its wandering dervishes are credited, in later memory, with much of the slow Islamization of the Turkic peoples.

The second and more durable order is the Naqshbandiyya, which traces its method through a chain of teachers around Bukhara known collectively as the Khwajagan, the “Masters.” The order takes its name from Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband, a fourteenth-century master of that city. Its signature is the silent dhikr — the remembrance held in the heart rather than spoken aloud — and a set of guiding maxims, among them the principle of “solitude in the crowd,” the demand that the adept keep the inward turning toward God while remaining at work in the ordinary world. Where some orders prized withdrawal, the Naqshbandiyya cultivated a sober engagement with society and, at times, with rulers.

That engagement made the order a political force as well as a spiritual one. From its base in Transoxiana the Naqshbandiyya spread across an enormous arc — into Mughal India, the Ottoman lands, the Volga, and western China — carried by trade routes and migrating shaykhs, and producing reforming offshoots that reshaped Sufism far from its origin. Modern scholarship treats the early biographies and miracle-narratives of these masters with caution, since the hagiographies were composed by disciples to honour a founder and to fix a lineage; the broad outline of the orders’ diffusion, however, is well documented.

What the masters of this tradition taught their followers to seek was maʿrifa, the experiential knowledge of God — not propositions about the divine but a direct acquaintance with it, reached through discipline, remembrance, and the guidance of a living teacher. The region produced no single founding text and no unified creed. It produced instead a method, handed from master to pupil, and a map of the heart that travelled wherever the dervishes went.

→ In the library: al-Hujwīrī — The Kashf al-Mahjúb (Nicholson, 1911)

→ Related: Chishti Sufism · Gnosis