A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

118 A history of Inner Asia
madrasa to be built and maintained in Bukhara, and gave instructions
that Sayf al-Din Bakharzi become the mudabbir (principal) of the school
and mutavalli (administrator) of the waqf endowment.Both the shaykh
himself and the shrine complex that subsequently developed around his
tomb in the Bukharan suburb of Fathabad illustrate the aforementioned
role played by the religious establishment, especially that of the Sufi
type, in the rehabilitation of Central Asia as prosperous Islamic society
recovering from the devastations wrought by the Mongol invasion and
its aftershocks.
Sayf al-Din Bakharzi also may have had influence on temporal
Muslim power serving the Mongols.Thus when Qutb al-Din Habash
Amid served as vizier under Chaghatay, the shaykh sent him what might
be called an “open letter” in the form of a poem reminding him of his
accountability before God for the way he treated Muslims.“Since you
have been appointed to make the [divine] truth prevail in this realm, if
you do not do that, what will you offer as excuse on Doomsday?…” There
is of course a pardonable inaccuracy in the shaykh’s address: Chaghatay
certainly did not appoint Habash to “make the divine, i.e. Islamic, truth
prevail,” unless the assumption is that the Mongol unwittingly acted on
God’s command.At any rate, this exchange must have happened before
1242, the year of Chaghatay’s death, thus also before the abovementioned
visit by Berke and donation by Sorqaqtani.Those events suggest
that the shaykh’s authority kept increasing especially in the final years of
his life.Little is known about the order’s role under his son and first khalifa,
Abu al-Muzaffar Ahmad, but one can infer that the internecine wars
among the Mongols, characteristic of the empire after the death of
Möngke and so crippling for the regions affected, could not but adversely
affect the Kubravi lodge.Things had begun to improve by the time of the
third generation, when in 712/1312–13 Sayf al-Din’s grandson Abu al-
Mafakhir Shaykh Yahya (d.736/1335–36) acceded to the stewardship of
the Bukharan branch.There was a general economic upturn, and the
shaykh was able to increase the resources of the lodge whose spiritual as
well as organizational center was his grandfather’s mausoleum, by
turning a portion of his personal wealth into a waqf or endowment destined
for the benefit of the shrine.He purchased eleven agricultural villages,
and the result was a considerable expansion of the shrine complex
and of its principal function, spiritual pursuits of the community and
provision of material means for doing so.Shaykh Yahya’s endowment is
vividly documented by three copies of the original waqf-name or endow-