A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 37
Koran, and of finding a path to His more immediate and comforting
presence.Those who first took steps in this direction came to be called
Sufis (from Arabic suf, wool, from which woollen robes worn by them
were made – hence also the term tasawwuf for Islamic mysticism).The
Sufis focused more on the compassionate nature of God also present in
the Koran, and created an elaborate and multifaceted system of practices
to approach the no longer awesome Deity as a reassuring Friend.
Eventually the men – known in the eastern Islamic world as dervishes –
seeking ways toward mystical union with God began to form religious
orders or tariqas (from Arabic tariqa, path [toward God]).The first such
orders appeared in the twelfth century and soon spread throughout the
Islamic world; most were known by the names of their founders, shaykhs
(from Arabic shaykh, old man, elder; also known by such Persian and
Turkic approximations as pir, khwaja, baba, or ata) who were often sayyids
or who claimed another illustrious lineage such as that from the first
caliph Abu Bakr, and who differed from each other chiefly in the way
they strove to reach their mystical goal.On the concrete level, they
formed communities that lived in cloisters known in Central Asia as
khangahs (Persian, literally “place of abode,” also transliterated as khanqah
and khanaqah; up to a point a synonym of the Arabic zawiya and ribat).A
khangah complex could also include a mosque, accommodation for visitors
and travelers, and a tomb or tombs of revered shaykhs, often
sayyids; pilgrimage to such shrines, ziyarat (lit.“visit”), came to constitute
one of the central religious rituals practiced by the masses of the Muslim
faithful.The adepts themselves eventually developed a prodigiously rigorous
and often sophisticated process of practices and rituals for attaining
their mystical goal, but one element appears essential: that of dhikr,
“recollection [of God]” in Arabic, which passed into Persian and Turkic
as zikr.The method was to think of God to the exclusion of anything
else, and could consist of a seemingly unending repetition of the first
part of the shahada, La Ilaha illa Llah (“There is no god but Allah”), or
of God’s name in its many variants such as the pronoun Huwa (“He” in
Arabic), meaning God.This ritual often was an elaborate process that
included a special manner of breathing and affected the Sufi’s physical
state.The zikr was practiced individually or in groups or circles of dervishes,
and it could be vocal (zikr jahri, zikr jali) or silent (zikr khafi).
From among the many Sufi tariqas that have spread all over the Islamic
world, four are especially characteristic of Central Asia: the Qadiriya,
Yasaviya, Kubraviya, and Naqshbandiya.Only one, the first, originated
elsewhere – in Baghdad, where it was founded by Abd al-Qadir Gilani