Abū Saʿīd Shāh (1192–51/1782–1835) was the head of the Naqshbandī-Mujaddidī khānqāh (Ṣūfī convent) in Delhi in the early nineteenth century. Abū Saʿīd was a descendant of Aḥmad Sirhindī (971–1034/1564–1624), the founder of the Mujaddidī branch of the Naqshbandiyya Ṣūfī bro…
Muḥammad al-Ḥāmid (1910–69) was a Muslim religious scholar ( ʿālim ), a Ṣūfī, and the founder of the Muslim Brother movement in Hama, Syria, the city in which he was born and raised. He was a son of Maḥmūd al-Ḥāmid (d. 1916), shaykh of the Naqshbandī Ṣūfī brotherhood in Hama. Hi…
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī (1855–1902) was a leader of the Islamic reformist trend in late Ottoman Aleppo, an early precursor of the modernist Salafiyya and of Arab nationalism. He belonged to a notable family of Sharīfian descent (that is, descendants of the prophet Muḥammad), …
Al-Fāsiyya (called also al-Raḥmāniyya or al-Makkiyya) is a nineteenth-century offshoot of the Shādhiliyya Ṣūfī brotherhood (the Shādhiliyya, founded by the Moroccan Abū l-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī, d. 656/1258, is well established in North Africa and the Middle East). The Fāsiyya was fo…
ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Bīṭār (1837–1917), a reformist Sunnī ʿālim in late Ottoman Damascus, is generally regarded as the founder of the modern Salafī trend in that city. ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Bīṭār was born into a middle-class religious family that resided in the Maydān, a large popular …
ʿĪsā al-Kurdī (1831–1912) was the shaykh of the Naqshbandiyya-Khālidiyya Ṣūfī brotherhood in late Ottoman Damascus. ʿĪsā al-Kurdī was born in the village of Talḥa in the province of Diyarbakır to a family that was related to the Buhtān (Bohtan) Kurdish amīr s, ruling family of t…
Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān (1111–95/1699–1781), a leading Naqshbandī-Mujaddidī Ṣūfī shaykh in Mughal Delhi, was born into a noble family of Afghan extraction that served in the Mughal administration. He received military as well as religious education, especially in ḥadīth studies, but …
ʿAbd al-Majīd b. Muḥammad al-Khānī (1847–1901) was a scion of the leading local Naqshbandī family in nineteenth-century Damascus (the Naqshbandī Ṣūfī order was founded in Bukhara by Bahāʾ al-Dīn, d. 791/1389). ʿAbd al-Majīd was initiated into the path by his grandfather, Muḥamma…
Ghulām ʿAlī Shāh (c. 1743–1824), also known as Shaykh ʿAbdallāh al-Dihlawī, was born and raised in Batala, in the Panjāb. His father, a Ṣūfī of the Qādirī brotherhood (an order named for ʿAbd al-Qādir Jīlānī, d. 561/1166, a Ḥanbalī scholar active in Baghdad), took the eighteen-y…
Dāwūd b. Sulaymān b. Jirjīs al-Mūsawī al-Baghdādī (b. 1812 or 1816, d. 1881) was born into a prosperous family in Baghdad and received a thorough religious education under his father. He was initiated into the Naqshbandī-Khālidī brotherhood by its local shaykh , ʿAbd al-Ghafūr a…