KOBRAWIYA ii. THE ORDER

 

KOBRAWIYA

ii. THE ORDER

The crystallization of a given line of Sufi tradition as an “order” should not be understood as imposing on all the spiritual descendants of the eponym a definitive and permanently binding choice of methods and emphases. This is particularly so with an order like the Kobrawiya that gave rise to several branches, each of which bore the secondary imprint of a figure regarded as authoritative, in his own way, as the eponym. Najm-al-Din Kobrā’s interest in the recording and analysis of visionary experience was inherited and pursued by later Kobrawis, especially Najm-al-Din Dāya Rāzi and ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni. On the other hand, a marked interest in the doctrines of Ebn al-ʿArabi, entirely absent from the works of Kobrā, came to characterize many of his descendants. Similarly, the heightened reverence for the Twelve Imams that ultimately led certain Kobrawis to the profession of Shiʿism was alien to Kobrā, who was indubitably a Sunnite, despite later attempts to appropriate him for Shiʿism. Furthermore, while the Kobrawiya ultimately died out in its Central Asian homeland, several of its branches persisted elsewhere, in Persia, Kashmir, Ottoman Turkey, the Arab lands, and China.

It will be convenient to mention first those ḵalifas (deputies) of Kobrā who themselves trained few disciples and did not contribute significantly to the continuation of his initiatic line. Majd-al-Din Aḥmad b. ʿOmar Baḡdādi, born in 1149 in the village of Baḡdādak near Ḵᵛārazm, was the scion of a wealthy and learned family that enjoyed close relations with the ruling dynasty. His brother, Bahāʾ-al-Din, was secretary to the Ḵᵛārazmšāh, and Majd-al-Din was himself in royal service until fairly early in life when he embarked on the Sufi path. He was initially assigned the task of cleaning the latrines at Kobrā’s ḵānaqāh, presumably in order to cure him of the arrogance that commonly accompanies high social standing; his mother offered to send ten Turkish slaves to take his place, but in vain. Despite this purgative experience, Majd-al-Din was incautious enough to set before his fellow disciples a parable that betokened unseemly spiritual pride. Kobrā was like a hen on a river bank, he told them, who had covered their egg-like beings with the wing of his nurturing; now they had emerged from their shells and entered the water, leaving the hen behind on the bank. Kobrā knew intuitively what was afoot and cursed Majd-al-Din, saying “May he die in the river!” The watery death thus predicted befell Majd-al-Din when ʿAlāʾ-al-Din Moḥammad Ḵᵛārazmšāh had him drowned as punishment for allegedly marrying the ruler’s widowed mother in secret. Somewhat illogically, Kobrā was enraged by this turn of events, and rebuffing the Ḵᵛārazmšāh’s apologies, he predicted that the whole of Ḵᵛārazm would be destroyed as a result of his actions (Jāmi, pp. 427-31).

In many of its details, especially its conclusion, this narrative may be dismissed as an attempt to portray the cataclysm of the Mongol invasion as the result of Kobrā’s wrath; a similar story has been told of Bahāʾ-al-Din Walad, the father of Rumi. Somewhat divergent accounts of Majd-al-Din’s end relate that he was amorously connected with a certain Leyli, the wife of a high-ranking member of the royal entourage, who avenged himself by beheading Majd-al-Din with the ruler’s approval; or alternatively that he was married to an unidentified woman from the royal household, the union being kept secret for unspecified reasons but with disastrous results (Zarrinkub, pp. 100-1). It may be inferred from these conflicting reports that Majd-al-Din had clandestine relations with at least one woman connected with the ruling dynasty, and that this, combined perhaps with the hostility and envy of other Kobrawis, led to his death at the hands of the Ḵᵛārazmšāh in 1220. His widow took the body for burial in her native city of Nišāpur; in 1430 he was disinterred and reburied in Esfarāʾen.

Majd-al-Din left behind several treatises in Persian, including Toḥfat al-barara fi ajwebat al-masāʾel al-ʿašara, answers given to ten questions posed by a certain Aḥmad b. ʿAli Mohaḏḏeb Ḵᵛārazmi. According to Moḥammad ʿAwfi (I, pp. 230-31), he also wrote poetry, and thus some of the quatrains attributed to him may indeed be his. Having predeceased Kobrā, Majd-al-Din was in no position to perpetuate his spiritual lineage. His name is sometimes inserted in the chain of spiritual descent (selsela), however, between that of Kobrā and that of Rażi-al-Din ʿAli Lālā, and it was also to him that Kobrā reportedly delegated the spiritual training of Najm-al-Din Dāya.

As for Najm-al-Din Dāya, his sole disciple (morid) was an otherwise unknown Demyāṭi (Yāfeʿi, IV, p. 136). It is true that Dāya’s main work, Merṣād al-ʿebād men al-mabdaʾ ela’l-maʿād, was read widely throughout the Muslim world, being translated into languages as far apart as Turkish and Chinese, and had a broader and longer lasting impact than any other piece of Kobrawi literature; the diffusion of this text was not visibly accompanied, however, by any propagation of the Kobrawi order. As for Jamāl-al-Din Jili (d. 1258), given the title ʿAyn-al-Zamān by Kobrā, little is known of him except that after his initiation he settled in Qazvin and was enabled by mystic insight to prescribe a cure for a ruler of Shiraz suffering from a stomach-ache (Jāmi, pp. 434-35).

A more broadly influential successor to Kobrā was Saʿd-al-Din Moḥammad b. Moʾayyad Ḥammuya (or Ḥammuʾi or Ḥammawayh). He was born at Baḥrābād near Jovayn in Khorasan in 1191 to a long-established family renowned for both formal learning and the practice of Sufism. He studied Hadith and theology (kalām) at various locations in Khorasan. He first came to Ḵᵛārazm in 1208 to study with a certain Šehāb-al-Din Ḵivaqi. Not yet aspiring to join Kobrā’s following, Saʿd-al-Din left the city in 1212 for further studies in Damascus and Mecca; in the former, he obtained a Sufi initiation from his father’s cousin, Ṣadr-al-Din Abu’l-Ḥasan Moḥammad, and in the latter, he met Abu Ḥafṣ ʿOmar Sohravardi. His primary association—that with Kobrā, began only when he returned to Ḵᵛārazm in 1219 or 1220, and it cannot therefore have lasted very long. Little is known of what transpired between him and Kobrā beyond the fact that he had in common with him a propensity for prolonged “absences” of the spirit from the body and that he was paired by Kobrā with Abu’l-Maʿāli Sayf-al-Din Bāḵarzi as a disciple of comparable age and temperament. Saʿd-al-Din left Ḵᵛārazm shortly before its conquest by the Mongols, apparently at the behest of Kobrā himself, and traveled incessantly throughout the rest of his life in Khorasan, Māzandarān, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Syria and the Ḥejāz. Of particular interest was the stay in Tabriz that immediately preceded his final return to Khorasan. He died in 1252 and was buried at the family ḵānaqāh at Baḥrābād (Faṣiḥ Ḵᵛāfi, II, p. 319; Heravi, Intro. to Saʿd-al-Din’s al-Meṣbāḥ fi’l-taawwof , pp. 9-19). His poetry, scattered in anthologies and biographical dictionaries, were collected and published by Saʿid Nafisi.     

During one of his sojourns in Damascus, Saʿd-al-Din made the acquaintance of Ebn al-ʿArabi, for whom he conceived a profound respect, describing him as “a boundless ocean;” Ebn al-ʿArabi is said to have reciprocated by calling him “an inexhaustible treasure.” Saʿd-al-Din was additionally in prolonged contact with Ebn al-ʿArabi’s principal disciple, Ṣadr-al-Din Qunawi. Thus Saʿd-al-Din once told Qunawi that there are no fewer than seven primordial covenants binding man to God, that referred to in Qurʾān, 7:172 being only one among them. Informed of this by Qunawi, Ebn al-ʿArabi concurred, but he cautioned him that beyond the seven principal covenants lie many lesser ones (Heravi, Intro. to Saʿd-al-Din’s al-Meṣbāḥ, pp. 20-21). It is in general with Saʿd-al-Din that Kobrawi attention to waḥdat al-wojud (the unicity of being) and related concepts and terms associated with Ebn al-ʿArabi originates; no such interest can be documented for any other first generation Kobrawi.

Also distinctive for Saʿd-al-Din Ḥammuya were his views on the relationship of prophethood (nobowwa) and “sainthood” (welāya). Each prophet, he declared, has also the quality of “saint,” for he is oriented simultaneously to God and to man; he is “saint” by virtue of the former orientation and prophet by virtue of the latter. Insofar as an orientation to God is self-evidently superior to one to man, the “sainthood” of the prophet is superior to his prophethood. Moreover, if the letters comprising the name of the letter nun, which is the first letter in nabi, are written out in full, they will be seen to consist of two nun s connected by, and therefore dependent on, a vāv; and since vāv is the initial letter of wali, the superiority of “sainthood” over prophethood thus stands visibly confirmed. As for those whose quality of “sainthood” is not conjoined with prophethood, Saʿd-al-Din opined that their “sainthood” begins with the ending of prophethood, in the sense that their task of revealing inner truths could begin only when prophethood had been sealed with the last of the prophets, Moḥammad (Heravi, Intro. to al-Meṣbāh, p. 30). This view was taken by a later Kobrawi, ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni, to imply the superiority of even the non-prophetic “saint” to the prophet, and he therefore therefore rejected it (ʿAlāʾal-Dawla Semnāni, Čehel majles, p. 46); it was accepted, however, by Semnāni’s teacher, Nur-al-Din Esfarāʾeni, albeit after some hesitation and much interpretive labor (Esfarāʾeni, Kāšef al-asrār, p. 54).

For Ḥammuya, it was only the Twelve Imams from the family of the Prophet that might rightfully be designated as wali after him. The twelfth among them, the expected Mahdi, counted therefore as the ḵātam al-awliāʾ (the seal of the saints), and his return to the manifest plane was about to take place (al-Meṣbāḥ, pp. 100-2). This view of matters has sometimes caused Ḥammuya to be classified as a Shiʿite, or at least as a proto-Shiʿite who foreshadowed the actual turn to Shiʿism that was made considerably later by some derivatives of the Kobrawiya. In point of fact, there is nothing in Saʿd-al-Din Ḥammuya’s depiction of welāya and the Twelfth Imam to suggest any inclination to confessional Shiʿism; it might rather be interpreted as an attempt to appropriate the Twelve Imams for a distinctively Sufi concept of sacred history. It is particularly telling that the epithet he applies to the Twelfth Imam is derived from the terminology of Ebn al-ʿArabi.

Most of Ḥammuya’s prolific output is in Arabic and remains unpublished, in part perhaps because of its abstruse nature; as Jāmi puts it, his works contain numerous “mysterious expressions, difficult words, figures, forms, and circles” (Jāmi, p. 431). Saʿd-al-Din’s al-Meṣbāḥ fi’l-taṣawwof, for example, is a prolonged exercise in the taʾwil (esoteric interpretation) of various names, concepts, sacred and terrestrial entities, and, above all, of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, together with the dots that distinguish identically formed letters from each other; it may have served as a source for the still more abstruse speculations of the Ḥorufi sect on the same subject.

Saʿd-al-Din was succeeded at the Baḥrābād ḵānaqāh by his son, Ṣadr-al-Din Ebrāhim, born at Āmol in Māzandarān in 1246. Like his father, Ṣadr-al-Din traveled very widely, mostly to study Hadith, and he seems also to have inherited from him prestige deriving from closeness to the Il-khanid administration. He was thus able to marry the daughter of ʿAlāʾ-al-DinʿAṭā-Malek Jovayni, the celebrated historian; more significantly, he was called on to officiate at the conversion to Islam of Ḡāzān Khan, probably at the behest of Amir Nowruz. According to Rašid-al-Din Fażl-Allāh, “the great shaikhly offspring (šayḵzāda-ye bozorg), Ṣadr-al-Din Ebrāhim, son of the pole of the saints, Shaikh Saʿd-al-Din Ḥammawi [sic], was often present in the retinue of the monarch and constantly engaged in expounding to him the religion of Islam ... until in early Šaʿbān 694/middle of June 1295, Ḡāzān Khan, together with all the amirs pronounced the creed and became Muslim” (Rašid-al-Din, pp. 79-80). Significantly, the monarch was dressed for the occasion in a robe that had belonged to Saʿd-al-Din; it seems unlikely that he regarded Ṣadr-al-Din as his personal preceptor or underwent intensive instruction at his hands, for a few months later he married one of his father’s wives, in contravention of Islamic precept. After the conversion ceremony, Ṣadr-al-Din left to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Baghdad. Returning from Mecca the following year, he spent an indeterminate amount of time in Damascus to pursue his study of Hadith before returning to his ancestral home of Baḥrābād, where he died in 1322. The only work attributed to him is Farāʾed al-semṭayn fi fażāʾel al-mortażā wa’l-batul wa’l-sebṭayn, a collection of Hadith extolling ImamʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb, Fāṭema, Imam Ḥasan, and Imam Ḥosayn.

A more prolific successor to Saʿd-al-Din Ḥammuya than his son wasʿAziz-al-Din Nasafi. Little is known of his life except what can be gleaned from his writings. During his youth, he studied medicine in addition to the religious sciences, and the acquaintance with philosophy that this entailed gave a distinctive coloring to his writings on Sufism. He joined the following of Saʿd-al-Din in Baḥrābād some time after 1243-44, but he may not have stayed there for long, for he was back in Bukhara when Saʿd-al-Din paid a brief visit to the city later in the decade. He fled Bukhara in 1272 when Abaqa/Abāqā Khan ordered its destruction and the massacre of its inhabitants, and he never returned to Transoxiana. He went first to the shrine of Saʿd-al-Din in Baḥrābād, then to Isfahan, next to Shiraz where he spent a time in retreat at the tomb of Abu ʿAbd-Allāh b. Ḵafif, and then to Abarquh and Kerman. The time and place of his death are unknown (Molé, Intro. to Ketāb al-ensān al-kāmel, pp. 3-9).

Nasafi’s works are highly individual in nature. They are limpid and easily comprehensible, although often repetitive and found in different redactions, and they stand in marked contrast to those of his master. Nasafi himself was aware of this, for at the very beginning of his Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq he relates a dream in which the Prophet told him, in Abarquh, on 10 Jomādā I 680/26 August 1281: “Ḥammuya is anxious for you; he tells me that the concerns he set forth in four hundred books, you have compressed into ten treatises, and while he tried to veil and conceal matters, you are attempting to unveil and proclaim them; he fears that some boor will attempt to harm you on this account.” The Prophet went on, however, to assure Nasafi that no harm would befall him if he refrained from circulating the Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq until the 7th century of the hejra had come to an end; then the book would be safely and universally studied in the madrasas. For that, however, it was too late, since part of the book was already in circulation; the Prophet therefore instructed Nasafi to hold the rest in reserve (Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq, pp. 3-4). This account not only demonstrates Nasafi’s self-view as a mere expositor of Ḥammuya’s ideas, whom he does indeed frequently cite, but it also shows that he shared in the calendrically inspired expectations that were rife at the time. Now the Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq, as its very title indicates, is meant to serve precisely as an unveiling of the inner truths that will be fully and definitively disclosed when the Ṣāḥeb-al-Zamān, that is, the Twelfth Imam who is also the Seal of the Saints, finally emerges. When that happens, Nasafi writes in his Maqṣad-e aqṣā, the cultivation of exoteric knowledge in the madrasa s will come to an end, and instead “truths (ḥaqāʾeq) will be discussed there” (Maqṣad-e aqṣā, p. 246). Correlating this prediction with the contents of the dream in Abarquh, one might reasonably conclude that Nasafi expected the Ṣāḥeb-al-Zamān to appear in the year 700 and his book, the Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq, to play some role in that event or to benefit from it. Somewhat incongruously, however, he criticized Ḥammuya’s belief that the emergence of the Ṣāḥeb-al-Zamān was at hand; it encouraged, he said, various unqualified people to clothe themselves in the glory of that title (Maqṣad-e aqṣā, p. 246). The evident contradiction this involves may perhaps be explained by fear of hostile reaction to some of his teachings, comparable to the fear that Ḥammuya is said to have voiced in the dream.

Like Ḥammuya, Nasafi equated the Seal of the Saints with the Ṣāḥeb-al-Zamān, and because of this and related teachings on welāya and prophethood he was posthumously claimed for Shiʿism by Nur-Allāh Šuštari. The question of Nasafi’s confessional affiliations is, however, in a sense misconceived. Significantly near the beginning of Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq (pp. 12-15), he sets forth with neutral equanimity views on the problem of creedal diversity propounded by three scholars from among the ahl-e šariʿat : two Sunnis (Mātoridi and Ḡazāli) and one Shiʿite (Abu Jaʿfar Ṭusi). This certainly indicates that he was prepared to consider Shiʿite ulema on the same level as their Sunni counterparts. Nasafi’s own opinion on the matter is, however, that in most cases the choice of maḏhab (denomination) is a result of mere imitation (taqlid), not independent investigation. If such investigation lies beyond the capacities of an individual, and he has no access to a competent guide, by which is meant neither a conventional shaikh nor an ordinary scholar, he should do those things on which all schools agree and be at peace with all men (Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq, pp. 27-29). None of this amounts to an endorsement of Shiʿism. Moreover, in clear opposition to Shiʿite belief, he restricts inerrancy (ʿeṣma) to the prophets, reserving for the awliāʾ, that is, the Imams, a lesser degree of divine protection from sin (ḥefẓ; Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq, p. 4). It remains true, of course, that Nasafi’s understanding of welāya is close to that of Twelver Shiʿism, although colored by the concepts of Ebn al-ʿArabi.

Ismaʿilis, too, have attempted to appropriate Nasafi; those of Badaḵšān in particular claiming to find proof of his Ismaʿilism in Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq (Ivanow, p. 99). His writings do not show any awareness of Ismaʿilism as it existed in his time, but a passage in the Maqṣad-e aqṣā (pp. 246-47) does suggest points of similarity, above all the notion that the parousia of the Ṣāḥeb-al-Zamān will be equivalent to resurrection, that time at the end of time when the inner realities of Islam, faith, prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage all become manifest, with the clear implication that their outer forms dissolve.

Intrinsically interesting as these matters may be, they do not inform the totality of Nasafi’s writing. His primary concern is to provide concise discussions of key concepts and terms, in easily accessible language. Thus his Ketāb al-ensān al-kāmel consists of an introduction detailing the traditional three levels of religion (šariʿat, ṭariqat, and ḥaqiqat), followed by twenty-two treatises (more in some redactions) dealing with topics such as the nature of man and his creation; the levels and varieties of tawḥid (unicity); eschatology; spiritual wayfaring; the microcosm and the macrocosm; the various realms of creation; the nature of heavenly entities such as the Pen; and the difference between revelation (waḥy), inspiration (elhām) and dreams. Much of the same material is to be found in Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq, organized into eight treatises, and in Zobdat al-ḥaqāʾeq, a discussion of the macrocosm and the microcosm in two long chapters that originated as the precis of a longer and still unpublished work on the same subject, Mabdaʾ wa maʿād. The Maqṣad-e aqṣā is of interest as the first Sufi prose text to be translated into a European language (Cologne, 1665).

These writings were the sole legacy of Nasafi. He had, no doubt, companions, including those who requested him to pen his works (unless the mention of such be dismissed as an authorial convention). Yet, although he addresses the concerns of practical Sufism, such as ādāb and the modes of ḏekr — in, for example, the eighth treatise of the Ketāb al-ensān al-kāmel — he neither founded a ḵānaqāh nor appointed any successors. He seems, indeed, to have deprecated those of his contemporaries who set themselves up as shaikhs: “O derviš, whoever draws the attention of men to himself, know for certain that he is utterly ignorant of God ... Whoever from among this group draws attention to himself is neither a saint nor a gnostic, but a hypocrite and the worst of men” (Ketāb al-ensān al-kāmel, p. 291).

The most obscure lineage deriving from Kobrā is that of Bābā Kamāl Jandi and his descendants. The last element in Bābā Kamāl’s name does not necessarily indicate birth in Jand, a city on the lower Syr Daryā, for it is more likely that he was born and grew up in Ḵᵛārazm; the only certainty is that he died in Jand in 1273. As for the title Bābā, this is an indication that, unlike the better-known successors to Kobrā, Jandi was either a Turk or became active in a Turkic environment, somewhat along the lines of contemporaneous Yasavi shaikhs; one source reports that he was “known among the Turkmen as ‘Shaikh Bābā,’” (DeWeese, 1994, p. 67). Unlike Najm-al-Din Rāzi, Rażi-al-Din ʿAli Lālā, and Saʿd-al-Din Ḥammuya, who fled westwards in the face of the Mongol invasion, Jandi migrated eastwards from Ḵᵛārazm not long before the fall of the city, to Jand and into the eye of the storm. It has been speculatively suggested that he went in fact as an emissary to the Mongols, sent by Kobrā to help engineer an alliance between them and the ʿAbbasids against their joint enemies, the rulers of Ḵᵛārazm (DeWeese, 1994, pp. 76-79). The evidence is, however, entirely circumstantial. Among the disciples that Bābā Kamāl trained in Jand was a certain Kamāl-al-Din Moẓaffari from Kashgar (Kāšḡar), who was in turn the shaikh of one Jamāl Qarši. He was succeeded, more significantly, by Majd-al-Din Aḥmad Mawlānā, mofti of the city of Torkestān (i.e., Yasi), from whom two lines proceeded. The first line includes Bahāʾ-al-Din Kobrawi, Dānešmand Moḥammad Mawlānā (the brother of Aḥmad Mawlānā), Abu’l-Fotuḥ b. Bahāʾ-al-Din, Abu’l-Wafāʾ Ḵᵛārazmi (d. 1431), and Kamāl-al-Din Ḥosayn Ḵᵛārazmi.

It is only the two last-named concerning whom anything substantial is known. Abu’l-Wafāʾ, known as the “angelic elder” (pir-e ferešta), left behind a certain amount of verse in which the influence of both Ebn al-ʿArabi and Rumi is evident. Abu’l-Wafāʾ’s successor, Kamāl-al-Din, wrote a commentary on the first three books of the Maṯnawi, titled the Jawāher al-asrār, as the result of an interest in Rumi that he had inculcated in him. The first volume of this commentary includes a hagiographical section in which Kobrawi affiliations are attributed not only to Rumi but also to Bahāʾ-al-Din Walad and Šams-e Tabrizi. In addition Kamāl-al-Din also wrote Yanbuʿ al-asrār fi naṣāʾeḥ al-abrār, a work on ethics, in Persian; and Kašf al-hodā, a commentary in Chorasmian Turkic on Buṣiri’s Qaṣidat al-borda, dedicated to the Shaybanid (Šaybānid) Uzbek ruler, Abu’l-Ḵayr Khan (r. 1438-68). Kamāl-al-Din was killed during an uprising in Ḵᵛārazm in either 1433 or 1436 and buried there next to Abu’l-Wafāʾ. With these two figures, one branch of the Kobrawi order had returned to its birthplace of Ḵᵛārazm, but it is also with them that its active presence there came to an end. All that remained in later centuries was a cult of pilgrimage to the tomb of the eponym.

The second line emanating from Aḥmad Mawlānā passed through Abu’l-ʿAṭāyā Ḵāled, Šams al-Din Maḥmud, and Ḥamid Samarqandi, all virtually unknown figures, and was then transmitted to India by a certain Aḥmad Jaunpuri. Four generations later, it reached ʿAbd-al-Aḥad Serhendi (d. 1578), and then his son, Shaikh Aḥmad Serhendi (d. 1624), whose Kobrawi loyalties were, however, entirely overshadowed by a Naqšbandi affiliation (Ḥaririzāda, III, fol. 136b).

A somewhat better known branch of the Kobrawiya in Central Asia stemmed from Sayf-al-Din Bāḵarzi, another of Kobrā’s ḵalifa s (deputies). Born in 1190 at Bāḵarz, a small town in Qohestān, he studied and acquired a preliminary initiation to Sufism in Herat before joining Kobrā in Ḵᵛārazm. He advanced swiftly in his esteem. When Kobrā instructed his disciples to dispense with their usual austerities in order to celebrate his bedding of a newly acquired concubine, Bāḵarzi selected as his own pleasurable indulgence a night vigil outside Kobrā’s chamber, holding a pitcher of water in hand for the shaikh’s post-connubial ablutions. Bāḵarzi was rewarded by his master with the prediction that he would one day enjoy the respect of rulers. Soon thereafter, he informed him, as he was in the midst of his second forty-day retreat, that his training was complete and that he should proceed to Bukhara to propagate the Kobrawi order.

Bāḵarzi spent the remaining forty years of his life in Bukhara. No distinguishing doctrinal emphasis can be associated with him, and his literary output was meager, amounting to a Persian treatise on love (Resālā-ye ʿešq), an Arabic account of visions he experienced in Ḵᵛārazm (Waqāʾeʿ al-ḵalwa; Brockelmann, GAL, Supp. 1, p. 810), and a number of quatrains. He enjoyed a general pre-eminence among the Sufi shaikhs of the city, and it was to him that Sorqatqani, the mother of Möngke, the great khan, entrusted the supervision of a madrasa that, despite her own allegiance to Christianity, she had established in Bukhara (Jovayni, III, pp. 8-9). She further enabled Bāḵarzi to establish a ḵanaqāh at Fatḥābād in the environs of the city. Bāḵarzi no doubt hoped that links with the Mongols such as these would favorably dispose them to Islam; this can be deduced from a versified letter he wrote to Qoṭb-al-Din ʿAmid-al-Molk Ḥabaš, vizier to Čaḡatāy Khan, one line of which reads: “You are entrusted, in this government, with promoting the truth (noṣrat-e ḥaqq); should you fail to do so, what will be your excuse on the Day of Gathering?”(cited in Barthold, 1963, p. 541). When Bāḵarzi was visited in Bukhara by Berke, the future ruler of the Golden Horde, he succeeded in fact in either converting him to Islam or strengthening him in the affirmation of the faith. Bāḵarzi’s zeal nonetheless sometimes brought him into conflict with the Mongols; thus he was once abducted while praying and detained for a while in the Mongol camp outside Bukhara (Richard; Yaḥyā Bāḵarzi, p. 270).

Beyond Bukhara, his influence extended to Kerman, where another royal lady, Qotloḡ Torkān Ḵātun of the Qotloghkhanid dynasty, sought association with him. At her request, he sent his middle son, Borhān-al-Din, to Kerman, and the ḵānaqāh she established for him became a center for the temporary expansion of the Kobrawiya in southern and southeastern Persia. Borhān-al-Din died in 1297 and was succeeded at the Kerman ḵānaqāh by his son, Abu’l-Mafāḵer Yaḥyā. Bāḵarzi was also in contact with Konya; he sent his youngest son, Maẓhar-al-Din Moẓaffar, to pay homage to Rumi on his behalf after reading samples of his verse that had been forwarded to him by a follower in Shiraz. This was, however, a literary linkage, and provides no evidence for a genetic connection between the Kobrawi and Mawlawi orders (Aflāki, I, pp. 143-45; Algar, “Sayf-al-Din,” p. 111).

The Fatḥābād ḵānaqāh continued to flourish for at least a century after the demise and burial there of Bāḵarzi in 1261. His eldest son, Jalāl-al-Din Moḥammad, inherited its administration, but he was killed two years later, a victim of intra-Mongol violence, whereupon his nephew, Abu’l-Mafāḵer Yaḥyā, came back from Kerman in order to take charge. This turn of events effectively brought to an end the activity of the Kobrawiya in Kerman; members of the Bāḵarzi family remained in the city and were locally celebrated as “kings of Bukhara” (šāhān-e Boḵārā), but they did not function as Sufi shaikhs. Fatḥābād, by contrast, now prospered to an unprecedented degree. Additional endowments were settled on the ḵānaqāh and funds were set aside for the purchase and manumission of slaves who, converted to Islam, were to work on lands belonging to the ḵānaqāh (Chekhovich, p. 184). Ebn Baṭṭuṭa visited the ḵānaqāh during Abu’l-Mafāḵer’s administration; he reports that he was received most hospitably and heard poems sung in Persian and Turkish by the resident dervishes. To this grandson of Bāḵarzi is also due a book of Sufi behavioral norms and customs (ādāb), Awrād al-aḥbāb wa foṣuṣ al-ādāb. Drawing in part on existing manuals of the same type, notably Żiāʾ-al-Din Abu’l-Najib Sohravardi’s Ādāb al-moridin, this work is valuable primarily for its anecdotes of the author’s grandfather, as well as quatrains attributed to him and other Kobrawi shaikhs.

The Bāḵarzi family lineage continued unbroken in Bukhara until at least the late 19th century, but not, it seems, as an initiatic tradition, even one of hereditary type. An offshoot of the Bāḵarzi line of Kobrawi transmission did, however, take root in India in the late 7th/13th century, first in Delhi and then in Bihar and western Bengal. This was the Ferdawsiya, established by Najib-al-Din Ferdawsi (d. 690/1291); he was a disciple of Badr-al-Din Samarqandi, a ḵalifa of Sayf-al-Din Bāḵarzi, who had settled at his behest in Delhi. No change in doctrinal emphasis is visible with the Ferdawsiya; it was rather geographic separation, together with the decay of the Bāḵarzi tradition in Bukhara, that caused the Ferdawsiya to be classified as a derivative of the Kobrawiya rather than one of its branches.

The successor to Kobrā most significant for the long-term transmission of his line was indisputably Rażi-al-Din ʿAli Lālā; Maʿṣum-ʿAli-Šāh (II, p. 339) says of him that it was he who transmitted “the great lineage of the Kobrawiya” (rešta-ye bozorg-e Kobrawiya). Rażi-al-Din was born in Ḡazna in roughly 1160 to Saʿid b. ʿAbd-al-Jalil, a nephew of the poet Sanāʾi. His father was a follower of Shaikh Yusof Hamadāni, ancestor of the Yasavi and Naqšbandi orders, and Rażi-al-Din ʿAli inherited from him the title “Lālā” (tutor) that Hamadāni had awarded him in recognition of services in training the younger disciples. Rażi-al-Din ʿAli’s acquaintance with Kobrā is said to have begun in a dream in which Kobrā was helping him, as well as many others, mount a ladder up to the heavens. On waking, he set out immediately in search of Kobrā, and in the course of prolonged and extensive travels he is said to have accumulated no fewer than one hundred and twenty-four ḵerqa s from the shaikhs he encountered. His travels reportedly took him to India, where he received a comb that the Prophet had earmarked for him from the notorious Bābā Ratan, supposedly a still living Companion of the Prophet and thus a centenarian seven times over. It was not until many years later, while sojourning at the ḵānaqāh of Shaikh Aḥmad Yasavi in the city of Torkestān, that Rażi-al-Din learned of the presence of Kobrā in Ḵᵛārazm and hastened to join his circle. Although ʿAli Lālā counts as a direct successor to Kobrā, his spiritual training was apparently entrusted to Majd-al-Din Baḡdādi, for it was he who sent him to act as his representative in Nišāpur. While thus employed, he earned the disfavor of Baḡdādi, albeit temporarily, and suffered from the hostility of the Ḥammuya family in nearby Baḥrābād. He died in 1244 in Jurfān (or Gurpān), a village in the district of Esfarāʾen (Jāmi, pp. 437-39).

The next link in this chain of succession was a native of the same village, Jamāl-al-Din Aḥmad Gurpāni, renowned principally for his silence. This condition may not have been entirely volitional, for Gurpāni’s foremost disciple, Nur-al-Din ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān Esfarāʾeni, described him as afflicted with a stutter (kall al-lesān; Kāšef al-asrār, p. 20). ʿAli Lālā nonetheless remarked of Gurpāni, “whoever can endure the silence of this Shaikh Aḥmad of ours will derive from him what others derived from Jonayd and Šebli.” One occasion on which he broke his silence was the arrival in Jurfān of Saʿd-al-Din Ḥammuya, who offered to write him an unsolicited ejāzat-nāma. He rebuffed the offer, telling him, “I do not worship God with ejāzat-nāma s” (Jāmi, pp. 436-40). Appropriately enough, Gurpāni favored the silent method of ḏekr (ḏekr-e ḵafi), accompanied by a jerking motion of the head from right to left. He died in 1270.

Esfarāʾeni was born in 1242 in the village of Kaserq, in a ḵānaqāh associated with the name of Abu Bakr Kattāni, a circumstance suggesting familial involvement with Sufism. After preliminary contacts with other shaikhs, he came to Gurpāni while still in his youth, and before long became his “chosen disciple” (morid-e ḵāṣṣ). Some seven years after the death of Gurpāni, Esfarāʾeni left Khorasan to perform the hajj, accompanied by some of his own disciples. The party reached Baghdad in 1277 and proceeded no further; the hajj was put off for almost a decade. Instead, Esfarāʾeni set about organizing a succession of ḵānaqāh s in the city, first at a location called Rebāṭ-e Sakina, then at Šuniziya (a district associated with some of the earliest Sufis as well as the place of burial of another Kobrawi, Najm-al-Din Dāya), and ultimately in a remodeled building in the eastern part of Baghdad. His ownership of the site was confirmed not later than 1309 by the Il-khanid ruler Oljāytu/Öljeitu, and either he or some other benefactor endowed this ḵānaqāh with much real estate and other property. The affairs of the ḵānaqāh were closely regulated, its denizens being divided into disciples particularly close to Esfarāʾeni (farzandān) and those of lesser rank (darvišān); some were to continue pursuing worldly occupations and others to devote themselves entirely to spiritual tasks; and ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni was vested with supervisory authority over them all (Landolt, Intro. to Kāšef al-asrār, pp. 10-19).

It is difficult to imagine that all this activity resulted from a spontaneous impulse that overcame Esfarāʾeni on his arrival in Baghdad. Given the intensity of his contacts with members of the Il-khanid administration and dynasty, it is far more likely that his purpose was, from the outset, to help restore the authority of Islam in the former capital of the caliphate. Among those with whom he corresponded from Baghdad were Jamāl-al-Din Dastjerdāni, secretary to Saʿd-al-Dawla, the Jewish vizier of Arḡun Khan, and several later viziers, at least one of whom, Saʿd-al-Din Sāvaji, formally became his disciple. More significantly, he wrote to both Ḡāzān Khan and Oljāytu, instructing them on the true nature of kingship: if the gnostic was the pole of the realm of spiritual being (malakut), he told the former, the sultan was the pole of the realm of material being (molk). The temporary disjunction between religion and kingship that had followed on the Mongol invasion was, he said, the result of the death of Majd-al-Din Baḡdādi at the hands of the Ḵᵛārazmšāh (Landolt, Intro. to Kāšef al-asrār, p. 17). Thereby he not only reiterated a standing theme of Kobrawi hagiography; he also suggested that the wellbeing of worldly authorities was dependent on the favor of shaikhs such as him. In essence, Esfarāʾeni’s activities in Baghdad were akin to those of other Kobrawis, notably Sayf-al-Din Bāḵarzi and Ṣadr-al-Din Ḥammuya, who were attempting to bring the Mongols into the fold of Islam.

That Oljāytu ultimately settled on Twelver Shiʿism as his chosen form of Islam cannot, however, be attributed to Esfarāʾeni’s influence; despite the correspondence mentioned above, tensions seem always to have beset his relations with the Il-khanids. Esfarāʾeni conformed fully to the Sunni idealization of the first four caliphs, and he found it necessary to emphasize that the status of Imam ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb as the supreme exemplar of esoteric knowledge was no reason to prefer Shiʿism to Sunnism; Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq, he claimed, would be repelled by the doctrines put forth in his name by the Shiʿites (Landolt, Intro. to Kāšef al-asrār, pp. 18-19).

Esfarāʾeni died in 1317, and his initiatic line bifurcated into the Nuriya, presided over by Amin-al-Din ʿAbd-al-Salām Ḵonji, Faḵr-al-Din Kāzeruni, and Šehāb-al-Din Demašqi; and the Rokniya, named after the first element in the name of Rokn-al-Din ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni. The former continued, at least nominally, into the late 16th century (see Zabidi, fol. 96a), but it is the latter that is far more significant for the perpetuation of the Kobrawi tradition. Semnāni, the author of a rich body of literature, is particularly notable for the fragments of autobiography scattered throughout his works; his correspondence with a wide variety of Sufi contemporaries, especially ʿAbd-al-Razzāq Kāšāni; his critical engagement with the theories of Ebn al-ʿArabi, particularly waḥdat al-wojud (unicity of being); his construction of a sevenfold scheme of laṭāʾef (subtle organs) to correspond to seven levels of Qurʾānic meaning and the seven main prophets; and his completion of the tafsir on which Najm-al-Din Rāzi had embarked.

Among Semnāni’s disciples, the following stand out: the poets Ḵᵛāju of Kerman (d. 1341 or 1352) and Salmān Sāvaji (d. 1367); Ašraf Jahāngir Semnāni (d. 1405), who traveling to India settled at Kichawcha near Oudh and whose spiritual descendants are sometimes regarded as constituting a suborder, the Ašrafiya; Aḵi ʿAli Dusti (d. 1334); and Maḥmud Mazdaqāni (d. 1364). The last two were entrusted by Semnāni with the training of the next major figure in this “great chain of the Kobrawiya,” ʿAli Hamadāni; it is Mazdaqāni whose name usually precedes that of Hamadāni in the recounting of the spiritual line of descent (selsela).

Hamadāni was a more prolific author than even Semnāni; he has been credited with more than a hundred treatises, primarily in Persian, on various topics of theoretical and practical Sufism and fotowwa, as well as a respectable body of verse. Among his lengthier works are Ḏaḵirat al-moluk, a book of ethical and spiritual advice for kings, and both a synopsis of Ebn al-ʿArabi’s Foṣuṣ al-ḥekam and a commentary on it, evidence that he did not share his preceptor’s misgivings concerning waḥdat al-wojud (the commentary has been misattributed to the Naqšbandi, Ḵᵛāja Moḥammad Pārsā; see Šarḥ-e Foṣus al-ḥekam). Hamadāni’s broad posthumous influence was due in large part to these writings, some of which were translated into Turkish; particularly popular was the litany he composed under the title Awrād-e fatḥiya, which is still recited today as far west as Bosnia by Sufis of various allegiances, particularly Naqšbandis who have incorporated it into their devotional manuals (e.g., Żiāʾ-al-Din Komošḵānawi, II, pp. 16-25).

Hamadāni was, however, equally tireless as a traveler, and his initiatic line was perpetuated in a number of places that he visited. In the twenty-year period of travel on which he embarked in 1334, he was engaged in gathering ejāza s for himself rather than giving them to others; Mazdaqāni was, after all, still alive and exercising his authority at the Hamadān ḵānaqāh. After some eighteen years of sedentary existence in his hometown, Hamadāni set out anew and struck eastwards, arriving in Badaḵšān in 1375. Despite an irascible nature that frequently clouded his dealings with all and sundry, Hamadāni enjoyed good relations with the local ruler of Badaḵšān, and it was there that he acquired two of the disciples who were to become his chief successors: his biographer, Moḥammad-Jaʿfar Badaḵši, and Esḥāq Ḵottalāni. The region in which he exercised the greatest influence was, however, Kashmir. He had been preceded there by two nephews: Tāj-al-Din, who had settled in Srinagar in 1361 and been enabled by the ruler, Šehāb-al-Din to establish a ḵānaqāh; and Sayyed Ḥosayn, who joined him there in 1371. It may have been a letter from Sayyed Ḥosayn informing his uncle that Kashmir was a land free of the baneful influence of Timur and where, moreover, large-scale conversion to Islam was underway, that prompted Hamadāni to move there, possibly in the year 1372 (the date 1381 has also been suggested; Rafiqi, p. 36). He not only founded a ḵānaqāh at ʿAlāʾ-al-Dinpura in Srinagar, but also traveled throughout the valley of Kashmir, preaching Islam vigorously in many localities that still had substantial Hindu populations, appointing deputies and establishing ḵānaqāh s. The chronology of his comings and goings while in Kashmir is confused, but it is said that he ultimately quit Kashmir in 1385, protesting the ruler’s refusal to impose the full rigor of šariʿa restrictions on still unconverted segments of the population (Pandit, p. 36). He died not long after in Kunar on the Upper Indus, and one year later, his body was taken for burial to Ḵottalān (i.e., Kulāb, in present-day Tajikistan).

Numerous followers of Hamadāni continued his work in Kashmir after his departure; among them, mention may be made of Pir Moḥammad Ḥāji Qāreʾ Balḵi (d. 1390) who, unlike his master, maintained friendly relations with Sultan Qoṭb-al-Din and built several ḵānaqāh s in Srinagar and elsewhere. In overall charge of the following Hamadāni had left behind was a certain Shaikh Aḥmad, the son of Shaikh Solaymān, a recent Brahman convert, both father and son having been initiated by Hamadāni during his sojourn in Badaḵšān. The succession then passed first to Shaikh Aḥmad’s son, Shaikh Fatḥ-Allāh Ḥāfeẓ, and next to his grandson, Shaikh Esmāʿil. The most celebrated member of this lineage, Shaikh Esmāʿil, maintained a ḵānaqāh at Kuh-e Mārān (i.e., Hariparbat) outside Srinagar that, together with the madrasa attached to it, drew students from as far afield as Herat and Transoxiana. He enjoyed the favor of a number of successive rulers, including Sultan Ḥasan Shah, who appointed him Šayḵ-al-Eslām of his realm. On Shaikh Esmāʿil’s death in 1510, he was succeeded at the ḵānaqāh first by one Bābā ʿAli Najjār, and then, when this ḵalifa turned to Shiʿism, by his son, Fatḥ-Allāh. When the Sunni-Shiʿi rivalry in Kashmir took on the aspect of a civil war, Fatḥ-Allāh found himself obliged by the ascendant Shiʿite faction to quit his ḵānaqāh, and he spent the rest of his days at Sialkot in the Punjab. Thus ended the presence in Kashmir of this line of Kobrawi transmission (Rafiqi, pp. 86-97).

What has been called a “second wave” of Kobrawi activity in Kashmir began with the arrival of Hamadāni’s son, Mir Moḥammad, in 1393, who had been trained after his father’s death by both Esḥāq Ḵottalāni and Moḥammad-Jaʿfar Badaḵši. Matters began auspiciously for Mir Moḥammad; the ruler, Sultan Eskandar, formally became his disciple, and caused a ḵānaqāh that came to be known as the Ḵānaqāh-e Moʿallā to be built for him on a site associated with his father’s sojourn in Kashmir. Further, Mir Moḥammad persuaded the ruler to destroy a number of Hindu temples and to impose payment of the poll-tax (jezya) on the Hindu population. He was opposed in this by another Kobrawi, Sayyed Moḥammad Ḥeṣāri Balḵi, who managed to have the poll-tax lifted. As a result, Mir Moḥammad quit Kashmir in disgust in 1405, much as his father had done some twenty-two years earlier. Most of the successors he left behind were immigrants from Persia and Transoxiana (Rafiqi, pp. 98-109).

Beyond Kashmir, the principal successor to Hamadāni was indubitably Ḵᵛāja Esḥāq Ḵottālani, born in 1330 or 1331 to a father who was connected to the ruling house of the region. His name is associated above all with the major schism in the Hamadāni line of Kobrawi transmission that resulted in the emergence of the Nurbaḵšiya and, somewhat later, the Ḏahabiya orders, as separate and rival orders, neither one having much in common with the original impulses of the Kobrawiya. The circumstances of the schism are differently presented in the sources: those that espouse the Nurbaḵšiya depict Ḵottālani as endorsing, if not originating, the claim of his disciple, Moḥammad Nurbaḵš, to Mahdihood, while others suggest that Ḵottālani, by then aged and decrepit, was persuaded by him to affirm his status as mahdi (Nur-Allāh Šuštari, II, pp. 143-47; Ḥāfeẓ Ḥosayn, II, pp. 249-50). There are reasons for preferring the second account, but whatever be the case, both Ḵottālani and Nurbaḵš were arrested by the Timurid governor of the region in 1424; the latter was released, despite the insurrectionary potential of his claim, but the former was executed, possibly because of his family ties to local rulers who were seeking to block the expansion of Timurid power. His corpse is said to have been placed, sitting cross-legged and facing the qebla (the direction of Mecca), at the entrance to a cave on Mount Fān, where it preternaturally resisted decay (Abu Ṭāher Samarqandi, pp. 105-6). A wizened corpse answering this description and attributed to Ḵottalāni is indeed still to be found just inside a cave near the village of Maḵševad in the north of Tajikistan, and it remains the object of pious visitation down to the present (Kamol, pp. 63-66).

ʿAbd-Allāh Barzešābādi, the principal adversary of Nurbaḵš among the followers of Ḵottālani, perpetuated his master’s line of Kobrawi transmission after his death without significant doctrinal change. After the passage of some four generations, one branch of the line descended from Barzešābādi gave rise, it is true, to the Ḏahabiya, a Shiʿite order found mostly in western regions of Persia. The designation Ḏahabi has, accordingly, sometimes been applied to Barzešābādi himself and to all his descendants. Many of them, however, were active not only in Azerbaijan but also in Khorasan, Central Asia, and elsewhere; none showed any inclination to Shiʿism; and some of them are described as following the “Hamadāni ṭariqat,” with reference to ʿAli Hamadāni. It seems desirable, therefore, to restrict the name Ḏahabi to the indisputably Shiʿite descendants of Barzešābādi.

Barzešābādi was born in 1387 in Barzešābād, a village near Mashad. He had began his spiritual training with Ḵᵛāja Moḥammad Pārsā (d. 1420), the celebrated Naqšbandi scholar, before joining the circle of Ḵottalāni, from whom he received his ejāza in 1422. Not long after the execution of his master, he returned to his native village of Barzešābād, where he died in 1467. Most of his followers were from Khorasan, or more precisely the region of Mashad, as were his initiatic descendants for the next three or four generations. He was succeeded first by Rašid-al-Din Moḥammad Bidāvāzi, buried in his native village of Bidāvāz (also near Mashad); next by Shaikh Šah ʿAli Bidāvāzi, said to have been buried in Ḵᵛārazm; and then by Ḥāji Moḥammad Ḵabušāni, a native of Ḵabušān, the present-day city of Qučān, but also reputed to have been laid to rest in the birthplace of the Kobrawiya (Ḥāfeẓ Ḥosayn, II, pp. 207-41). After the last-named, a further bifurcation of this Kobrawi line took place. One of his pupils, Ḡolām-ʿAli Nišāpuri (d. 1531), is found only in the Ḏahabi line of succession, and it may have been under his auspices that the crucial shift to Shiʿism took place, leading to the crystallization of the Ḏahabiya as a separate order (the name Golām-ʿAli is itself suggestive of such a transition). Other successors of Ḵabušāni definitely maintained a Sunni orientation and succeeded, albeit temporarily, in re-implanting a Kobrawi presence in Ḵᵛārazm and Transoxiana, and one took the order as far west as Istanbul and Aleppo.

One of these successors, ʿEmād-al-Din Fażl-Allāh Mašhadi, was killed early in life by the Shaybanid Uzbeks, probably during their campaign against Mashad in 1508. Another, Kamāl-al-Din Ḥosayn Ḵᵛārazmi (not to be confused with the identically named descendant of Bābā Kamāl Jandi mentioned above), nonetheless cultivated friendly links with the Shaybanids. In 1493, he joined the following of Ḵabušāni, and some eleven years later he was sent back by him to his native city of Ḵᵛārazm in order to propagate the ṭariqa. In 1517, Ḵᵛārazmi left for Transoxiana, where he spent the next thirty years, principally in Samarqand, building ḵānaqāh s with the support of endowments established by the Shaybanids. He died and was buried in Aleppo while returning from the hajj in 1551 (Schwarz, pp. 65-67). It happens that other Kobrawis had preceded him to Aleppo, for there is a reference to a certain Moḥammad b. Moḡolbāy, the son of an emancipated Circassian slave (d. 1535), who is described as the “shaikh of the Hamadāni community” in Aleppo and presided over recitations of the Awrād-e fatḥiya in the Rowāḥiya madrasa (Ḡazzi, II, p. 59). Both the origin and the ultimate fate of this Kobrawi branch are entirely obscure.

Although Ḵᵛārazmi appointed numerous successors in places such as Samarqand, Marv, and Tashkent, the Kobrawiya was destined before long to be overwhelmed throughout the entire region by the superior influence of the Naqšbandiya. The line established at Sāktar, a village near Bukhara, by Mawlānā Shaikh Pāyanda, one of his successors, seems to have been the sole exception; it remained active until at least 1688.

Ḵᵛārazmi also had a Kashmiri disciple, Yaʿqub of Srinagar, generally known as Ṣarfi “the grammarian,” which was the pen-name he used in the Persian verse he began composing at the age of seven. Born in 1521, Ṣarfi traveled widely before joining the circle of Ḵᵛārazmi in Samarqand. Once his training was complete, he was sent back to Kashmir. Before long, he aspired to revisit his master in Samarqand, but learned on his arrival there that Ḵᵛārazmi had just left to perform the hajj. He therefore followed him to Mecca, and took advantage of the occasion to study tafsir and Hadith with the great scholar, Ebn Ḥajar ʿAsqalāni. From the Ḥejāz he returned to Kashmir, but he spent much time elsewhere in India, including several sojourns at the Mughal court during the reigns of both Homāyun and Akbar I, and he earned the esteem of such luminaries as the poet Fayżi and the historian ʿAbd-al-Qāder Badāʾuni. During a stay in Sialkot, he instructed Shaikh Aḥmad Serhendi (d. 1624), the future Mojadded-e Alf-e Ṯāni (renewer of the second millennium), in Hadith and also initiated him into the Kobrawiya order. Serhendi’s determining affiliation was, however, to the Naqšbandiya, and the transmission of his Kobrawi lineage by the shaikhs of the Naqšbandi-Mojaddedi order that he established was purely nominal. Ṣarfi returned definitively to Kashmir in 1594 and died there the following year (Rafiqi, pp. 117-24).

The ḵalifa of Ḵabušāni who made his way to Istanbul was ʿAbd-al-Laṭif Jāmi, a descendant of Shaikh Šehāb-al-Din Aḥmad-e Jām, Ženda-Pil (d. 1141). When the Safavids conquered Khorasan, he prudently left for Bukhara and Samarqand, where he is said to have enjoyed great fame and success. When, in about 1543, he arrived in Istanbul en route to the hajj, he was similarly treated as a person of eminence. He was granted an audience with Sultan Solaymān Qānuni, whom he proceded to instruct in the Kobrawi method of ḏekr, and he obtained from him the appointment of a certain Moḥammad Efendi, a descendant of Barzešābādi, to the post of Ottoman naqib al-ašrāf (the head of the descendants of the Prophet). During his stay in Istanbul, ʿAbd-al-Laṭif Jāmi also bestowed a Kobrawi initiation on Ḵazini, a migrant shaikh from Transoxiana, who already had a dual Yasavi and Naqšbandi affiliation (Ḵazini, fol. 136a). He next passed through Aleppo, residing for a while in the Ḵosrawiya tekke (takiya, center of a Sufi order), which may have been a Kobrawi foundation, and impressing many with his recitation of the Awrād-e fatḥiya. After performing the hajj several years in succession, he ultimately returned to Central Asia, stopping again in Aleppo on the return journey. He died in Ḵᵛārazm in 1556 (Aṭāʿi, p. 72; Ḡazzi, II, pp. 181-83). His tomb was visited not long after by the Ottoman admiral Sidi Ali Reis in the course of his overland journey from India to Turkey; he identifies him as his pir, presumably on the basis of an initiation received in Istanbul some years before (Sidi ʿAli Reis, p. 71). Neither this nor any other initiation bestowed by ʿAbd-al-Laṭif Jāmi in Istanbul resulted in a permanent Kobrawi presence in the Ottoman lands. The order remained almost completely unknown there: all that can be pointed to are the ancestral links to the Kobrawiya of Amir Solṭān (d. 1429), the patron saint of Bursa, and the participation of an otherwise unknown Kobrawi dervish, Moṣṭafā Dede, in the conquest of Istanbul.

Another line of descent from ʿAbd-al-Laṭif Jāmi led through Torsun Marvi and Ṣadr-al-din Boḵāri to Ḵᵛāja Bāqi-be’llāh (d. 1603), who was primarily a Naqšbandi in his affiliations and is best known as the preceptor of Shaikh Aḥmad Serhendi (Bāqi-be’llāh, pp. 29-30).

Prominent among the non-Khorasani ḵalifa s of Barzešābādi was Amir Badr-al-Din Lāla (d. 1506), a sayyed from Šarvān/Šervān, who made his acquaintance after a pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam ʿAli al-Reżā in Mashad. After receiving his initiation he settled in Lāla, a village one farsaḵ distant from Tabriz, soon renamed Darvišābād in light of his preceptorial activities. He was succeeded as presiding shaikh of the village first by one of his sons, Ṣafi-al-Din Šāh Mojtabā (d. 1575), and then by a grandson, Ḥāfeẓ Ḥosayn Karbalāʾi (commonly known as Ebn al-Karbalāʾi). Despite the Safavid conquest of Azerbaijan and the attendant persecution of Sunnis, the Kobrawi shaikhs of Lāla remained obstinately Sunni. At least initially they were spared significant harassment, perhaps because of their popular repute, and another son of Badr-al-Din Lāla, Amir Šehāb-al-Din (d. 1540), was briefly in the service of Shah Esmāʿil I as ṣadr (the head of the religious institution). Ḥāfeẓ Ḥosayn Karbalāʾi nonetheless found it politic to migrate to Damascus in 1581, where he taught until the end of his life in 1589 and wrote his important work on the Sufi lineages of Tabriz, his own family included (Ḥāfeẓ Ḥosayn, II, pp. 109-72). The initiatic activity of this Kobrawi branch thereupon came to an end.

The designation of the Lāla lineage as Ḏahabi, occasionally encountered even in modern works (e.g., Arjomand, p. 114), is erroneous and not to be found anywhere in Ḥāfeẓ Ḥosayn’s work, which is after all the authoritative source for its history. He describes his selsela rather as ʿAbd-Allāhiya-ye ʿAlawiya-ye ʿAlāʿ-al-Dawlawiya-ye Kobrawiya. This cumbersome designation implies recognition of the following individuals as the principal figures of the Kobrawiya: ʿAbd-Allāh Barzešābādi, ʿAli Hamadāni, ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni, and Najm-al-Din Kobrā. It may be significant that in certain relatively late manuscripts of Rawżāt al-janān Ḥāfeẓ Ḥosayn’s wording has been scratched out and replaced by “ʿAlawiya-ye Rażawiya-ye Mahdawiya-ye Ḏahabiya-ye Kobrawiya” (Solṭān-al-Qorrāʾi’s Intro., I, p. 35). This suggests an attempt not only to obscure the Sunni identity of the sayyed s of Lāla but also to claim the entire body of Barzešābādi’s descendants for the Ḏahabiya and therefore for Shiʿism.

Like the branch of the order administered by the Lāla sayyed s, the various Kobrawi lineages delineated above also expired by the end of the 10th/16th century, with only minor exceptions; the Ḏahabi and Nurbaḵši offshoots alone were able to perpetuate themselves. Records of sustained Kobrawi transmission are to be found, it is true, in a number of what might be called selsela catalogues, compiled between the 11th/17th and 13th/19th centuries. The earliest of these, al-Semṭ al-majid by Ṣafi-al-Din Aḥmad Qošāši (d. 1661), lists several Kobrawi initiations received by the author in Medina (p. 75). Similar listings are provided by Ḥosayn b. ʿAli al-ʿOjaymi (d. 1702) in his Ḵabāyā al-zawāyā (fols. 36a, 116b); Šā h Wali-Allāh Dehlawi (d. 1762) in his al-Entebāh fi salāsel awliāʾ Allāh (p. 141; he claims to have had an initiatic vision of Kobrā while trekking up Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka); Mortażā Zabidi (d. 1791) in his ʿEqd al-jawhar (fols. 36, 53, 83-84, 87, 96, 99); Moḥammad b. ʿAli Sanusi (d. 1859) in his Salsabil al-maʿin (pp. 17-19); and Kamāl-al-Din Ḥaririzāda (d. 1882) in his Tebyān wasāʾel (III, fols. 140a-144b). The initiations contained in these listings were nominal, however; intertwined with a whole series of initiations into other orders and branches of orders, they did not amount to a real perpetuation of the Kobrawiya. They functioned for the most part as simple tokens of mutual respect exchanged among various Sufis and scholars resident in the Ḥaramayn, akin to the honorary ejāza s for the transmission of Hadith, the bestowal of which was also fashionable at the time. In the cases of Shah Wali-Allāh Dehlawi and Sanusi, the accumulation of a fistful of selesela s served also to bolster their claims to have subsumed the entirety of Sufi tradition in a new and authoritative synthesis. As for Qošāši, he had several Javanese students who transmitted his various selsela s to South East Asia. Garbled thereafter through constant retelling, these initiatic lines account for the legend that Sunan Gunung Jati, one of the “nine saints of Java,” was initiated into the Kobrawiya while in Mecca by none other than Najm-al-Din Kobrā himself. There is no trace of identifiable Kobrawi activity in either Java or Sumatra (van Bruinessen).

The case of China is entirely different; it is in fact only there that the existence of the order today can be documented. The first Kobrawi contact with China was made by Borhān-al-Din Boḵāri, a disciple of Sayf-al-Din Bāḵarzi; expelled by the Mongol authorities from their domains to the realm of the Sung, he died there without leaving any visible trace. Of the four Persian texts known to have been translated into Chinese in pre-modern times, two were by Kobrawi authors: Najm-al-Din Rāzi’s Merṣād al-ʿebād and ʿAziz Nasafi’s Maqṣad-e aqṣā. The former was translated in 1670 or 1672 by Wu Tzu-hsien as Kuei-chen yao-tao and the latter in 1679 by She Yün-shan as either Yen-chen ching or Kuei-chen pi-yao (Murata, pp. 32-33; Benite, pp. 130-32). The appearance of these translations cannot, however, be taken as evidence for an organized Kobrawi presence in China.

The order, known in Chinese either as Kuburenye, Kuberinye, or Kubulinye, is said to have been introduced to China by a certain Muhuyingdeni (i.e., Moḥyi-al-Din), probably during the early years of the Qing dynasty. Some sources identify him as an Arab, presumably on account of his claim to descent from the Prophet, but it is overwhelmingly likely that he came from Central Asia. He is recorded to have made two preliminary journeys to China for the purpose of propagating Islam and the Kobrawi order (the first to Guangzhou and Guangdong and the second to Hunan and Hubei) before settling at Dawantou in the Dongxiang region of Gansu, an area heavily Mongol in population. He was swiftly integrated into the local community, being given a plot of land to cultivate and adopting the locally prevalent name of Zhang, so that this branch of the Kobrawiya came to be known as the Zhang Bao Huang. His success in propagating Islam was, however, limited because of his inability to master the local dialect. By contrast, the son who succeeded him, Aiheimaiti Kebikuo Baihedai, was so effective in his work of proselytization that hostile elements denounced him to the Qing authorities, who kept him imprisoned for the rest of his life. The shrine constructed for him by his followers remained a major site of pilgrimage for this remote branch of the Kobrawiya until its destruction by Guomintang forces in 1928. Aiheimaiti had five sons, all of whom were conscripted into the Qing army; the third son converted to Lamaist Buddhism, but the fourth, although deficient in religious knowledge, inherited his father’s position at the head of the Zhang Bao Huang. The leadership then passed hereditarily through six more generations to a certain Hezhesanyi; in 1949, one of his sons rallied to the Communist cause and served on the Minority Affairs Commission of Ningxia, while another opposed it and earned denunciation as a “bandit.” The Chinese Kobrawis are said regularly to withdraw to a cave for retreats of forty, seventy, or one hundred and twenty days, during which time they engage continuously in vocal ḏekr and are permitted only a handful of nuts and one cup of water a day (Ma Tong, pp. 451-55). This branch of the Kobrawiya is still centered at Dawantou; in 1989, its hereditary leader was Moḥammad Ebrāhim Eʿzām-al-Din, who claimed to be a Ḥosayni sayyed on his mother’s side and a Ḥasani on his father’s. In 1983, the Kobrawiya was estimated to have 10,000 adherents in China, a figure that had doubled by 1991, when the Kobrawis were said to represent 0.7 percent of the total Muslim population (Gladney, pp. 52, 392; Feng Jian Yuan, p. 91).

Their fellow Sufis in China seem to have little awareness of the Kobrawis. According to a respected ahong of the Ḵofya branch of the Chinese Naqšbandiya, encountered by d’Ollone in 1907, the origins of Kobrawi tradition go back to the second caliph ʿOmar b. ʿAbd-al-Ḵaṭṭāb; this plainly erroneous belief went together with the notion that each of the four sufi orders active in China — the Ḵofya and Jahriya branches of the Naqšbandiya, the Qāderiya, and the Kobrawiya — derived from one of the four Righteous Caliphs of the Sunni belief. The name “Kobrawiya” was explained by reference to the advanced age at which ʿOmar was thought to have died (d’Ollone, p. 276).

Apparently unconnected to the Kobrawis of Dawantou is a group of devotees located at Egiz-Eriq near Qarāqāš in Khotan; they are celebrated for a distinctive form of samāʿ and cite an otherwise unknown Kobrawi lineage deriving from Afghanistan (Rahimi, pp. 385-86).

Otherwise with respect to the present, all that remains to be said is that a certain Azar Mirza Beg (b. 1951), resident in Baku, claims to be the present master of the Kobrawi order. The extent of his following is unknown (see his website).

Bibliography (see also the bibliographies to ʿALĀʾ-al-DAWLA SEMNĀNĪ; ʿALI HAMADĀNI; and DĀYA, NAJM-al-DĪN):

Works by Kobrawi authors.

ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni, al-ʿOrwa le ahl al-ḵalwa wa’l-jalwa, ed. Najib Māyel Heravi, Arabic text with anonymous Pers. tr., Tehran, 1983.

Idem, Čehel majles yā Resāla-ye eqbāliya, ed. Najib Māyel Heravi, Tehran, 1987.

Idem, Moṣannafāt-e fārsi-e ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni, ed. Najib Māyel Heravi, Tehran, 1991.

ʿAli Hamadāni, Ḏaḵirat al-moluk, ed. Sayyed Maḥmud Anwari, Tabriz, 1980.

Idem, Šarḥ-e Foṣus al-ḥekam, ed. Ḵalil Mesgar-nežād, Tehran, 1987.

Nur-al-Din Moḥammad-Jaʿfar Badaḵši, Ḵolāṣat al-manāqeb: dar manāqeb-e Mir Sayyed ʿAli Hamaḏāni, ed. Sayyeda Ašraf Ẓafar, Islamabad, 1995.

Sayf-al-Din Bāḵarzi, “Resāla-ye ʿEšq,” ed. Saʿid Nafisi, MDAT 8/4, 1961, pp. 11-24.

Yaḥyā Bāḵarzi, Awrād al-aḥbāb wa foṣuṣ al-ādāb, ed. Iraj Afšār, Tehran, 1979.

Šehāb-al-Din ʿAbd-Allāh Barzešābādi, Šarḥ-e Lamaʿāt-e Faḵr-al-Din ʿErāqi, ed. Aḥmad Qodsi, Tehran, 2000.

Najm-al-Din ʿAvd-Allāh Dāya Rāzi, Merṣād al-ʿebād men al-mabdaʾ ela’l-maʿād, ed. Moḥammad-Amin Riāḥi, Tehran, 1986; tr. Hamid Algar as The Path of God’s Bondsmen from Origin to Return, Delmar, New York, 1982.

Nur-al-Din Esfarāʾeni, Mokātabāt-e ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān Esfarāʾeni bā ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni, ed. Hermann Landolt, Tehran and Paris, 1972.

Idem, Kāšef al-asrār, ed. Herman Landolt, Tehran, 1979; tr. Hermann Landolt as Le Révelateur des mysteres, Paris, 1986.

Saʿd-al-Din Ḥammuya, al-Meṣbāḥ fi’l-taṣawwof, ed. Najib Māyel Heravi, Tehran, 1983.

Kamāl-al-Din Ḥosayn Ḵᵛārazmi, Jawāher al-asrār wa ẓawāher al-anwār, ed. Moḥammad-Jawād Šariʿat, Isfahan, 1981.

Idem, Yanbuʿ al-asrār fi naṣāʾeḥ al-abrār. ed. Mahdi Deraḵšān, Tehran, 1981.

Idem, Kašf al-hodā, ed. and tr. Davin DeWeese as “The Kashf al-Hudā of Kamāl al-Din Ḥusayn Khorezmi: A Fifteenth-Century Sufi Commentary on the Qaṣidat al-Burda in Khorezmian Turkic,” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1985.

Majd-al-Din Aḥmad b. ʿOmar Baḡdādi, Toḥfat al-barara fi masāʾel al-ʿašara, Majles Library, Tehran, ms 589; Pers. tr. by Moḥammad-Bāqer Saʿidi Ḵorāsāni, ed. Ḥosayn Ḥaydar Ḵāni, Tehran, 1989.

ʿAziz-al-Din b. Moḥammad Nasafi, Kašf al-ḥaqāʾeq, ed. Aḥmad Mahdawi Dāmḡāni, Tehran, 1980.

Idem, Ketāb-e ensān-e kāmel, ed. Marijan Molé, Tehran, 1962; tr. Isabelle de Gastines as Recueil de traités de soufisme connu sous le titre de Le Livre de l’Homme Parfait, Paris, 1984.

Idem, Maqṣad-e aqṣā, in Ganjina-ye ʿerfān, ed. Ḥāmed Rabbāni, Tehran, n.d., pp. 10-85; excepts tr. in Latin by A. Müller as Excerpta Manuscripti Cujusdam Turcici, Cologne, 1665 (based on a Turkish paraphrase).

Idem, Zobdat al-ḥaqāʾeq, ed. Ḥaqqverdi Nāṣeri, Tehran, 1984.

Idem, selected works, tr. by Lloyd V. J. Ridgeon as Persian Metaphysics and Mysticism: Selected Works of Aziz Nasafi, London, 2002.

Other sources.

Abu Ṭāher Samarqandi, Samariyya: dar bāra-ye awṣāf wa mazārāt-e Samarqand, ed. Iraj Afšār, Tehran, 1964.

Šams-al-Din Aflāki, Manāqeb al-ʿārefin, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, Ankara, 1959.

Olga Akimushkin, “Das Traktat des Quṭbaddīn Aḥmad b. ʿImādī Yazdī über die Regeln des mystischen Weges der Hamadānīya-Ḏahabīya,” in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia III: Arabic, Persian and Turkish Manuscripts (15th-19th Centuries), ed. Anke von Kügelgen, Ashirbek Muminov, and Michael Kemper, Berlin, 2000, pp. 43-61.

Hamid Algar, “Nank al-Dīn Rāzī Dāya,” in EI² VII, pp. 870-71.

Idem, “Sayf al-Dīn Bākharzī,” in EI² IX, pp. 110-11.

Elizabeth Ross Alexandrin, “The Sciences of Intuition and the Riches of Inspiration: Najm al-Dīn Kubrā in Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns,” in B. Todd Lawson, ed., Reason and Inspiration in Islam: Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought, Essays in Honour of Hermann Landolt, London and New York, 2005, pp. 284-97.

Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam : Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shiʿite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 , Chicago, 1984.

Moḥammad ʿAwfi, Lobāb al-albāb, ed. Edward G. Browne and Moḥammad Qazvini, 2 vols., Leiden and London, 1903-06.

Nawʿizāda ʿAṭāʾi, Ḥadāʾeq al-ḥaqāʾeq fi takmilāt al-Šaqāʾeq, ed. Abdulkadir Özcan, Istanbul, 1989.

Bahārestān-e šāhi, ed. Akbar Ḥaydari, Badgham, 1982; tr. Kashi Nath Pandit, as The Bahāristān-i-Shāhī: A Chronicle of Mediaeval Kashmir, Calcutta, 1991.

Bāqi Be’llāh, Mašāyeḵ-e ṭoroq-e arbaʿa, ed. Ḡolām Moṣṭafā Khan, Hyderabad (Sind), 1972.

Vasiliĭ Vladimirovich Barthold, Turkestan v epokhu mongol’skogo nashestviya, in idem, Sochineniya (Collected works), I, Moscow 1963.

Moniri Belgrādi, Selselat al-moqarrabin, ms. Şehid Ali Paşa 2819, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul.

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China, Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 2005.

Jean A. Berlie, Islam in China : Hui and Uyghurs between Modernization and Sinicization, Bangkok, 2004, p. 46.

Evgenuĭ Èduardovich Berthel’s, “Chetverostishiya Sheikha Nadzhm al-Dina Kubra” (The quatrains of Shaikh Najm-al-Din Kobrā), in idem, Sufizm i sufiĭskaya literatura, Moscow, 1965, pp. 324-28.

Idem, “Chetverostishiya Sheikha Madzhd al-Dina Baghdadi” (The quatrains of Shaikh Majd-al-din Baḡdādi), in ibid., pp. 335-39.

Idem, Sufizm i sufiĭskaya literatura (Sufism and Sufi literature; Russ. tr. of articles originally published in German), Moscow, 1965; tr. Sirus Izadi as Taṣawwof wa adabiyāt-e taṣawwof, Tehran, 1977.

C. D. Chekhovich, Bukharskie Dokumenty XIV veka (Bukharan Documents of the 14th Century), Tashkent, 1965.

Henry Corbin, En Islam Iranien : aspects spirituels et philosophiques, 4 vols., Paris, 1971-72, III, pp. 275-355.

Idem, L’homme de lumière dans le soufisme iranien , Paris, 1971; tr. Nancy Pearson as The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, Boulder, Colorado, 1978, pp. 99-110, 121-39; tr. Farāmarz Jawāheri-niā as Ensān-e nurāni dar taṣawwof-e irāni, Tehran, 2000.

Commandant d’Ollone, Recherches sur les musulmans chinois, Paris, 1911.

Devin A. DeWeese, “The Eclipse of the Kubravīya in Central Asia,” Iranian Studies 21/1-2, 1988, pp. 58-94.

Idem, “Khusain Khorezmi: Sredneaziatskii Sufii Nachala XV v.” (Ḥosayn Ḵᵛārazmi: Central Asian Sufi of the early 15th century), in M. M. Khairullaev, Iz Istorii Sufizma: Istochniki i Sotsial’naya Praktika (From the history of Sufism: Sources and social practice), Tashkent, 1991, pp. 49-61.

Idem, “Bābā Kamāl Jandī and the Kubravī Tradition among the Turks of Central Asia,” Der Islam 71/1, 1994, pp. 58-94.

Idem, “Dog Saints and Dog Shrines in Kubravī Tradition: Notes on a Hagiographical Motif from Khwārazm,” in Denise Aigle, ed., Miracle et karāma: hagiographies médiévales comparées, Turnhout, 2000, pp. 459-67.

Idem, “Two Narratives on Najm ad-Dīn Kubrā and Razī ad-Dīn ʿAlī Lālā from a Thirteenth-Century Source: Notes on a Manuscript in the Raza Library, Rampur,” in B. Todd Lawson, ed., Reason and Inspiration in Islam: Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought, Essays in Honour of Hermann Landolt, London and New York, 2005 pp. 298-339.

Ibrahim Düzen, “Azîz Nesefî,” Türkiye diyanet vakfı Ëslam ansiklopedisi, Istanbul, 1988-, IV, pp. 344-46.

Jamal J. Elias, “The Sufi Lords of Bahrabad: Saʿd al-Din and Sadr al-Din Hamuwayi,” Iranian Studies 27/1 1994, pp. 53-75.

Idem, The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ʿAlāʾ ad-Dawla as-Simnāni, Albany, NY, 1995.

Esmāʿil Ḥaqqi (Hakkı) Borsavi, Ruḥ al-bayān, 10 vols., Istanbul, 1969.

Faṣiḥ Aḥmad b. Moḥammad Ḵᵛāfi, Mojmal-e faṣiḥi, ed. Maḥmud Farroḵ, 3 vols., Mashad, 1960-62, II, pp. 268-69.

Najm-al-Din Moḥammad Ḡazzi, al-Kawākeb al-sāʾera be aʿyān al-meʾat al-ʿāšera, ed. Jebrāʾil Solaymān Jabbur, 2 vols., Beirut, 1979.

Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic, Cambridge, Mass, 1991.

Ḡolām Sarvar Lāhuri, Ḵazinat al-aṣfiāʾ, Kanpur, 1332/1914, II, pp. 257-61, 267-80, 272-75, 281, 288, 293, 331.

Suraiya Gull, Mir Saiyid ʿAli Hamadani and the Kubraviya Sufi Order in Kashmir, New Delhi, 2003.

Ḥāfez Ḥosayn Karbalāʾi Tabrizi (Ebn al-Karbalāʾi), Rawżāt al-jenān wa jannāt al-janān, ed. Jaʿfar Solṭān-al-Qorrāʾi, 2 vols., Tehran, 1970.

ʿAbd-al-Rafiʿ Ḥaqiqat, Ḵom-ḵāna-ye waḥdat: Šayḵ ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnāni, Tehran, 1983.

Moḥammad Kamāl-al-Din Ḥaririzāda, Tebyān wasāʾel al-ḥaqāʾeq fi bayān salāsel al-ṭarāʾeq, ms. Fatih 430-432, 3 vols, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul.

Martin Hartmann, Zur Geschichte des Islam in China, Leipzig, 1921, p. 105.

Reżāqoli Khan Hedāyat, Sefārat-nāma-ye Ḵᵛārazm, Paris, 1876.

Wladimir Ivanow, A Guide to Ismaili Literature, London, 1933.

ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān Jāmi, Nafaḥāt al-ons, ed. Maḥmud ʿĀbedi, Tehran, 1991, pp. 427-45.

Ḥamza Kamol (Kamāl), Mazorhoi šimoli Tojikiston (Mazārhā-ye šemāl-e Tājikestān), Dushanbe, 2004.

Elyor Karimov, Kubraviiskii vakf XVII-XIX vv.: pis'mennye istochniki po istorii sufiiskogo brastva Kubraviia v Srednei Azii (The Kobrawiya waqf of the XVII-XX centuries: written sources on the Kobrawiya Sufi brotherhood in Central Asia), Tashkent, 2008.

Ḵazini, Ḥojjat al-abrār dar asāmi-e awliā-ye kebār, ms. ancien fonds persan, Bibliothèque Nationale, 1226.

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(Hamid Algar)

Originally Published: July 15, 2009

Last Updated: July 15, 2009