Suhrawardiyya (Suhrawardi Order)

The Suhrawardiyya is among the earliest of the formally organised Sufi orders, and its importance lies partly in the founding text that gave the orders in general their institutional shape.

A rule for the order

The order was founded by Abu al-Najib al-Suhrawardi of Baghdad in the twelfth century and given its enduring form by his nephew Abu Hafs Umar al-Suhrawardi, whose manual of the Sufi life, the Awarif al-maarif, became one of the most widely used guides to the discipline, method and etiquette of an order. That a written rule of this authority stood at the head of the tradition helped fix the very idea of the tariqa as an organised body with a settled method, so the Suhrawardiyya contributed to the institutionalisation of Sufism beyond its own membership.

Baghdad and the road to India

Centred at first on Baghdad, the order spread eastward and became especially important in the Indian subcontinent, where its masters were among the earliest to establish organised Sufism, alongside the Chishtis. In contrast to the Chishti avoidance of rulers, the Suhrawardi masters of India were often willing to accept the patronage and the gifts of the sultans, a difference of posture toward political power that distinguished the two great early orders of Indian Islam. The Suhrawardiyya thus stands both as a founding influence on the organised orders generally and as one of the principal channels by which Sufism took institutional root in South Asia.

Umar al-Suhrawardi gave his uncle's order its lasting institutional shape, but his most durable contribution reached well beyond the Suhrawardiyya itself: his manual Awarif al-Maarif set out Sufi method, etiquette and organisation in terms so systematic that it was adopted as a standard reference well outside Suhrawardi circles, studied by initiates of other orders entirely as a general guide to the Sufi path rather than as a text specific to one lineage.

The order's own geographic reach ran in a different direction from many of its Sufi contemporaries: rather than concentrating in the Arab heartlands, the Suhrawardiyya spread strongly into the Indian subcontinent through Baha ud din Zakariya, who established the order at Multan in the thirteenth century and built it into a major religious and political presence across Punjab and Sindh, rivalling the Chishtiyya's influence in the same region even though the two orders took noticeably different attitudes toward political power, the Suhrawardiyya generally more willing to engage directly with ruling authorities than the more court averse Chishti masters active in Delhi at roughly the same period. The shrine and lineage Baha ud din Zakariya established at Multan continued under hereditary custodians for generations afterward, giving the order in South Asia the same kind of family based continuity that kept the Qadiriyya anchored to Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani's tomb in Baghdad, even as the order's presence in its original Iraqi heartland gradually receded in the face of other tariqas.