The First Order, and the Saint at the Centre of It

The Qadiriyya is the oldest and most widespread of the Sufi orders, and its history shows how an order can form around the posthumous reputation of a saint.

Organised after the founder

The order traces itself to the Hanbali jurist and preacher Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, who died in 1166, but it was organised as an order by his descendants after his death rather than by the man himself. His tomb and school in Baghdad became its centre, and the reputation of Jilani for orthodoxy and sanctity, more than any single doctrine, is what carried the order across the Islamic world from West Africa to India and Southeast Asia.

A path, not a sect

Like the other orders, the Qadiriyya is a way of devotion rather than a school of law: an initiate keeps his own madhhab and follows the order in its litany and its chain of transmission, and it has been ordinary to belong to it while remaining fully within Sunni orthodoxy. Its practice centres on audible dhikr and on the silsila from master to disciple. The Algerian resistance leader Abd al-Qadir belonged to it, one of several instances in which a Qadiri affiliation stood behind an anti-colonial movement.