ABSTRACT
With Nasir al-Din ‘Ubaydullah Ahrar, commonly revered as Hazrat Ishan, the formative phase of the Naqshbandiyya brotherhood reached a critical edge. Under him, most though by no means all Naqshbandi groups of Central Asia were brought together within a well-organized interregional network, and he was also the first to send emissaries outside Transoxiana. Ahrar’s role as a spiritual master was closely connected to his ramified socioeconomic activity and his political involvement, which became a model for the public application of the principle of solitude in the crowd. Both his Sufi and his worldly activities placed a fresh accent on the supremacy of the shari‘a, and more still on the duty of spiritual masters to strive to secure its implementation by rulers. Though Ahrar’s enterprise seemed to falter after his death, it prepared the ground for the dominant position that the Naqshbandiyya was to acquire in Central Asian Sufism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as for the spread of the brotherhood to other parts of the Muslim world.
