The Great Order of Iran, and Its Turn to Shiism

The Nimatullahiyya is the principal Sufi order of Iran, and its history traces the movement of Persian Sufism into the Shia world.

Shah Nimatullah

The order is named for Shah Nimatullah Wali, a widely travelled master and poet of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who settled at Mahan in the province of Kerman, where his shrine remains a major place of pilgrimage. He founded a Sufi lineage that took deep root in Persia, and the order became closely identified with the religious life of Iran. Over the following centuries, as Iran itself became overwhelmingly Twelver Shia under the Safavids, the order came to reflect that identity, so that the Nimatullahiyya is the great example of a Sufi order integrated with Shia Islam rather than with the Sunnism of most of the orders.

Decline, revival and division

The order suffered periods of severe persecution and near-extinction in Iran and was revived from the eighteenth century by masters sent from the Deccan, where a branch had survived. In the modern period it has divided into several lines, some remaining within Iran and others establishing a presence in the West, where the order teachings have been carried to a new readership. The Nimatullahiyya thus stands as the foremost Iranian order, its long history recording both the vulnerability of the Sufi orders to political hostility and their capacity to be revived and carried abroad.