Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani

Abd al-Qadir came to Baghdad from Gilan, on the Caspian, some time in his teens, and the outline of his early life there is thin: study, poverty, and a long period of withdrawal are what the sources agree on. What is well recorded is the second half. He was a jurist of the Hanbali school, the most textually strict of the four Sunni schools of law, and he taught and preached from a madrasa placed under his direction. His sermons drew crowds large enough that he preached out of doors, and the accounts of them describe an audience that included Jews and Christians as well as Muslims.

The point worth holding on to is that his Sufism sat inside the law rather than beside it. Nile Green's history of Sufism uses him as an example of how far the developed mystical tradition was integrated with legal scholarship in this period, against the persistent modern picture of Sufism as a movement of outsiders. The works of exhortation attributed to him, chiefly a manual of the sufficiency for seekers of the path of truth and the collection called the revelations of the unseen, are addressed to disciples who are expected to keep the ritual law in full while working on the interior life.

He died in Baghdad in 1166. His reputation grew steadily after his death, and titles accumulated on it, of which the largest is al-Ghawth al-Azam, the supreme helper. The scale of that reputation across the Muslim world is out of all proportion to anything he is recorded as claiming for himself.

The Qadiriyya is generally called the oldest of the Sufi orders and is certainly among the most widely spread, with branches from Morocco to Indonesia and a very large presence in West Africa. What it is not is an organisation Abd al-Qadir founded. J. Spencer Trimingham's account of the orders is explicit that the Qadiriyya took shape after his death, assembled by his sons and by later teachers who traced their chain of transmission back to him, and that the process by which a teaching circle becomes an order with a rule, a hierarchy and a lineage happened across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries generally rather than in one act.

This is the ordinary pattern rather than an exception, and it is worth stating because the language of foundation obscures it. A Sufi order is a lineage, and lineages are drawn backwards. The founder is identified by those who claim him.

His tomb in Baghdad, in the quarter that carries his name, has been a centre of visitation for eight centuries and is the anchor of the order's geography. It also sits inside the dispute this atlas records under the wali: shrine visitation is exactly the practice that currents from Ibn Taymiyya onward have rejected, and the Qadiriyya has been among the institutions most directly affected by that argument in the modern period. In parts of West Africa the order is a mass institution with a social reach a medieval Baghdadi preacher could not have imagined, and in other places its shrines have been attacked.