Tasawwuf

Abdul Qadir Gilani (c. 1077-1166 CE) was a Hanbali jurist and preacher of Baghdad whose sermons drew large audiences and whose works combine legal instruction with spiritual counsel. The Qadiriyya order was organised around his memory by his sons after his death.

Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi (1165-1240 CE) was an Andalusian mystic whose writings, above all al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya and Fusus al-Hikam, form the most influential and most disputed body of speculative thought in Islamic mysticism.

Four Sufi orders shaped religious life in the Indian subcontinent: the Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Suhrawardi. This article traces how they functioned there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how initiation into several orders at once weakened the identity of each.