8
The Naqshbandi Order
Khwaja Bahauddin Naqshband (1317-1389), the founder of the
Naqshbandi order, was born at Kushk-i-Hinduwan, a village near Bhukhara
in Central Asia. Later, in his honour, the village came to be known as
Kushk-i Arifan.The title
Naqshband
that he used literally means ‘a painter’
or ‘an embroiderer’. It is possible that it refers to the profession followed
by his family, but it may just as easily have been a metaphorical usage
indicative of his spiritual capacity to imprint the name of God upon a
disciple’s heart.
In the mediaeval period, it was not uncommon for children to be sent
to the Sufis to receive spiritual knowledge, but this was usually done after
they had acquired an education in the traditional disciplines such as the
recitation of the Qur’an and the study of the
hadith
and jurisprudence. At
the age of 18, Khwaja Bahauddin was likewise entrusted to a Sufi saint,
Muhammad Baba as-Samasi (d. 1354), who lived in a village called Samas.
This saint was a spiritual descendent of KhwajaAbuYaqubYusuf al-Hamadani
(d. 1140), founder of
silsila-i-khwajgan
. It is said that Samasi could see the
latent spirituality and greatness of Bahauddin and therefore assigned his
training to his chief
murid
, Amir Kulal (d. 1371). It did not take Bahauddin
long to achieve mastery in the required spiritual exercises. This made the
Shaykh so pleased with his progress that he appointed him his
khalifah
.
Early in his association with Amir Kulal, Bahauddin had a vision in which
he saw his six predecessors in the
silsila
, beginning with ‘Abd al Khaliq
