Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the Ghawth al-A'zam

The clearest named claimant to the rank in the historical record is Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the twelfth century Baghdad preacher whose teaching circle became the seed of the Qadiriyya, the oldest of the formally organized Sufi orders. Qadiri tradition styles him al-Ghawth al-A'zam, the Greatest Succor, a title that in South Asian and much later Qadiri usage is treated as effectively equivalent to qutb, the saint whose intercession is sought before any lesser figure's. Shrines and hagiographic literature built around Jilani across the Muslim world, from Baghdad to the Indian subcontinent, rest on exactly this claim, and Qadiri custodianship of his Baghdad tomb passed through a hereditary line of his descendants for centuries, part of J. Spencer Trimingham's survey of how the order's leadership structure grew directly out of veneration for its founder's supposed rank.

The claim is not uncontested. The same reformist current that rejects the broader category of the wali, the Muslim saint, as a corruption of strict monotheism, tracing to Ibn Taymiyya and continuing through modern Salafi and Wahhabi critique, rejects the entire hierarchy of saints the qutb sits atop as an unfounded elaboration with no basis in scripture, making Jilani's title a live point of division between traditionalist Sufi devotion and reformist Islamic scholarship rather than a settled honorific.