A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

140 A history of Inner Asia
The abovementioned Khwaja Muhammad Parsa is also credited with
having anchored the Naqshbandi tariqa in a firm doctrinal base through
his numerous writings.Of a different but equal importance was
Mawlana Yaqub Charkhi, originally from the Afghan city of Ghazni, for
he was the murshid of the most striking personality among Baha al-Din
Naqshband’s khalifas, the aforementioned Khwaja Ubaydallah Ahrar
(1404–90).
Khwaja Ahrar was born into a well-to-do family of landowning and
mercantile shaykhs from the village of Baghistan near Tashkent, but he
did his formal studies in Samarkand at a maktab and a madrasa.Attraction
to Sufi ways made him drop the latter school and leave Samarkand for
Herat, the reputed center of Naqshbandi pirs.It was there or, according
to another report, in the nearby province of Chaghaniyan that he linked
up with Mawlana Charkhi.The murid eventually returned to his hometown,
presumably released by his murshid as a mature khalifa and murshid,
and his subsequent trajectory amply corroborated those expectations.
He again left Tashkent, this time definitively for Samarkand, in whose
suburb of Kafshir (now called Kamangaran) he founded a khangah as
the kernel of the Ahrari lodge.
Khwaja Ubaydallah Ahrar’s charismatic personality gained enormous
prestige, political role and wealth both for him and for his family
as well as for the Naqshbandi tariqa.The shaykh’s intervention may have
contributed to the victory of the Timurid Abu Said in the contest for the
throne in Samarkand in 1451, and his subsequent influence on the ruler
was only matched by that he exercised on Abu Said’s son and successor,
Sultan Ahmad (1469–94).His prestige and activities were far-flung and
included Herat.At both centers he acted as a moral mentor, protector
of the Muslim community, and shrewd businessman, exhorting the
sultans to abolish unlawful taxes and be generous to the Sufis.The
wealth of the order, through waqf endowments, and of his family
through successful business ventures (the two are not always easy to distinguish)
grew exponentially under Khwaja Ahrar’s tutelage, and not
only in Samarkand but in other parts of Central Asia as well.Like the
order’s founder Baha al-Din Naqshband, Khwaja Ubaydallah Ahrar
was a strong upholder of the sharia and Sunni Islam, and the moral force
the tariqa possessed served the next dynasty, that of the Shaybanids, well
in their life-and-death struggle with the Shii Safavids.
The Ahrari branch of the Naqshbandi tariqa will come up again in
our discussion of the next dynasty to rule Central Asia, the Shaybanids.
Here a few words about the decline and demise of the Timurids in