Named Orders, and a Modern Challenge to the Whole Relationship

The great historical Sufi orders each take their structure and their distinctive practices from a founding murshid whose name the order still carries: the Qadiriyya from Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani in twelfth century Baghdad, the Naqshbandi order from a line reaching to Baha-ud-Din Naqshband in fourteenth century Central Asia, and the Chishti order, especially influential in South Asia, from Moinuddin Chishti, whose shrine in Ajmer remains a major pilgrimage site. Each order transmits its own specific litany and method through its own line of murshids descending from that founder, so the content of the guidance a murshid gives varies by order even though the basic master-disciple structure is shared across them all.

The whole relationship has also drawn sustained theological criticism from Salafi and Wahhabi currents within Sunni Islam, which regard the degree of reverence some Sufi orders direct toward a living or deceased murshid, including practices at shrine tombs, as bordering on or crossing into shirk, associating another being with God's own unique authority, a doctrinal objection that has translated in some countries into the physical destruction of Sufi shrines and continues to make the murshid relationship a genuinely contested rather than universally accepted feature of Sunni Islam.