A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

142 A history of Inner Asia
formal sciences and chose the Sufi path instead.Rather than attaching
himself to a prominent living master, he came under the spell of a longdeceased
one, Bayezid Bistami (d.874; in this sense he could be considered
an uwaysi, like his spiritual descendant Baha al-Din Naqshband),
whose mystical utterances had inspired successive generations of Sufis
before the actual formation of tariqas.Yusuf Hamadani’s own charismatic
personality gained him a following of disciples and invitations
from other centers of Islamic culture, especially Merv, Herat, and
Bukhara.He lived in what was politically the empire of the Great
Seljuks, and his final years coincided with the reign of Sultan Sanjar and
of his vassals the Qarakhanids – two Turkic dynasties ruling the chiefly
Iranian part of the Dar al-Islam.It was in Bukhara that the shaykh
formed four of his principal khalifas: after the death of the first two,
Ahmad Yasavi was honored with that role in 1160, but did not stay long
there; turning over that function in this still essentially Iranian city to
Abd al-Khaliq Gijduvani, he returned to his hometown of Yasi, presumably
to spread his master’s path among his fellow Turks.The Tariqa-i
Khwajagan, the Path of the Khwajas thus named after its initiators’ title
(that is, after Khwaja Yusuf Hamadani), found its characteristically
Central Asian expression through two branches, the Iranian one starting
with Khwaja Abd al-Khaliq Gijduvani in Bukhara, the Turkic one
with Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi in Yasi.The Iranian branch, as we have
seen, coalesced into a full-fledged tariqa only two centuries later with
Khwaja Baha al-Din Naqshband and then assumed this founder’s name
as the Naqshbandiya; the Turkic branch, on the other hand, flourished
from the beginning as the Yasaviya, and became the great Sufi order of
Central Asian Turks.
Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi did not live long after his return to Turkestan,
for he died in 1166 or 1167 (the Hijra year 562).Those six or seven years
among his countrymen sufficed, however, for the khwaja to gain a great
following of steppe Turks, and he passed the torch to khalifas who
insured the preservation of his memory and of the type of Sufi poetry
he devised for the benefit of unsophisticated but enthusiastic recent converts.The
didactic poems he composed became known as hikmats
(“wisdoms,” a loanword from Arabic), and gained tremendous vogue
among Central Asian Turks, and, through imitators, even among those
of Turkey.In its present form, the Divan-i Hikmat could hardly have been
penned by him or written down by others directly from his utterances.
The earliest extant copies can be dated to the seventeenth century, and
their language is demonstrably not the Turkic of the twelfth century.It