The establishment of the Order
The Suhrawardi order traces its spiritual origins to Shaykh Abu Najib
Suhrawardi (1097-1168) though it was his nephew and disciple Shaykh
Shihabuddin Suhrawardi (1145-1234), who laid the true foundations of the
order.The order was brought to the Indian subcontinent by his able disciples,
Shaykh Bahauddin Zakariyya, who founded a
khanqah
(Hospice)
in Multan,
Shaykh Jalal’uddin Tabrizi, who settled in Bengal, and Qadi Hamiduddin
Nagauri who settled in Delhi. The Suhrawardi
silsila
went on to become
one of the most popular on the subcontinent, next only to the Chishtiyya,
though the continuous history of the
silsila
can be traced only through the
khalifas
of Shaykh Bahauddin Zakariyya.
Shaykh Abul Najib Suhrawardi
Abu’l Najib ‘Abd al Kahir bin ‘Abd Allah al Bakri (1097-1168) was a
Sunni mystic who flourished in the 12
th
century. He was born in Suhraward
in the Jibal region. As a young man he came to Baghdad and studied the
hadith
,
Fiqh
and Arabic grammar and literature at the famous Nizamiya
madrasa
.When he was in his twenties, he abandoned formal studies, turned
to asceticism and returned to Isfahan .There he joined Ahmad al Ghazali (d.
1126), the illustrious mystic and brother of Muhammad al Ghazali, and
became his disciple. Later on he returned to Baghdad where he became a
disciple of Hammad al Dabbas (d. 1131), an unlettered Sufi of great
excellence, who was also the
pir
of Abdul Qadir Jilani. He taught
fiqh
and
6
The Suhrawardi Order
