Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Preacher of Baghdad

Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani was born in 1077 or 1078 in Gilan, on the Caspian coast of present day Iran, and travelled to Baghdad as a young man to pursue the standard course of Islamic legal and theological study available in the city that still, despite the Abbasid caliphate's declining political power, remained the pre-eminent centre of Sunni scholarship anywhere in the Islamic world. He trained within the Hanbali school of law, among the most textually conservative of the four surviving Sunni legal schools, and built a reputation as a preacher of unusual force, first appearing in that public role in 1127 after years of study and, by his own later account, a period of ascetic withdrawal in the countryside around the city.

Al-Jilani led a teaching hospice, a ribat, in Baghdad for the remainder of his life, attracting students from across the Islamic world until his death in 1166, and it is precisely his standing as an accepted, mainstream Hanbali jurist that distinguishes the order that grew from his circle from many other Sufi paths: nothing in his own recorded teaching set him doctrinally apart from the Sunni establishment of his day, and the order named for him has rarely attracted the suspicion that fell on more overtly antinomian or philosophically speculative Sufi movements elsewhere. His tomb and hospice in Baghdad's Bab al-Sheikh quarter remain a site of pilgrimage today, visited by Qadiri Sufis and by Sunni Muslims more broadly who hold him in high regard independent of any tariqa affiliation.