Ubaydullah Ahrar

The most influential Naqšbandī shaikh of 9th/15th-century Transoxania; known for his influence over the Timurid rulers and the figure under whose auspices the Naqšbandīya became supreme among the Sufi orders of Central Asia. The source stresses that surprisingly little is known of his career and that the sources are often contradictory or biased.

He was born in 806/1404 at Bāḡestān in the welāyat of Tashkent, into a family of hereditary shaikhs with agricultural and commercial interests. He studied in a maktab and later in a madrasa in Samarkand, though this he left after two years, claiming that he had not even mastered two pages of Arabic grammar (Rašaḥāt). His works show him to have been by no means uneducated; he may have played down his book learning to emphasize the heaven-sent quality of his inspiration.

Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār first appears in Samarkand at the age of twenty-two. Two years later he set off for Herat in search of a pīr; he found one instead in Čaḡānīān, in the person of Yaʿqūb Čarḵī, a Naqšbandī from Badaḵšān. He returned to Tashkent ca. 835/1431-32 to live on the family estates. His activities at this time are obscure, but he evidently aroused the opposition of the local ʿolamāʾ — the hagiographies are liberal with accusations of heterodoxy on both sides. The source notes that, since such accusations were a commonplace of the theological disputes of the time, there is no necessity to take them at face value.

After the judicial murder of Oloḡ Beg, the Timurid Abū Saʿīd finally gained control of Samarkand in the summer of 855/1451. The Rašaḥāt gives all the credit to Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār, who, on condition that Abū Saʿīd uphold the Šarīʿa, threw the weight of his following to his side. The source also records Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār's unsuccessful journey in 854/1450 to see Abū Saʿīd in Samarkand. By 858/1454 Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār was solidly established at Samarkand, organizing the defense of the town and reinforcing Abū Saʿīd's morale in the face of attack by Abu'l-Qāsem Bābor from Khorasan. His declaration that he was the mediator between the townspeople and the ruler on the occasion of the suppression of an uprising at Samarkand in 862/1458 shows the evolution of his political role, though his insistence on the maintenance of fixed strata of society, in which Sufis existed to inspire the love of God and the established order, shows his influence to have been essentially conservative.

Following the execution of Gawhar Šād in 861/1457, Abū Saʿīd made Herat his virtual capital, and Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār's influence remained restricted to Transoxania. He visited Herat, however, from 23 Ṣafar to 11 Rabīʿ I 865 (8–25 December 1460), when he persuaded Abū Saʿīd to lift the tamḡā and other “forbidden taxes” in Samarkand and Bukhara. During the rebellion of Moḥammad Jūkī b. ʿAbd-al-Laṭīf at Šāhroḵīya and the ensuing protracted siege of that fortress between 865/1461 and 868/1463, Abū Saʿīd used both the šayḵ-al-Eslām of Samarkand, Borhān-al-Dīn, and Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār as diplomatic emissaries; Aḥrār was ultimately successful in imposing the condition that the rebels' lives be spared, though Moḥammad Jūkī was imprisoned at Herat and died there in 869/1464. In the winter of 872/1467-68 Abū Saʿīd, having become totally dependent upon his advice, summoned Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār to discuss the possibility of a campaign in western Persia following the death of the Qara Qoyunlu ruler Jahānšāh. The decision was a disaster: Abū Saʿīd set out in early Šaʿbān 872 (late February 1468); his army was annihilated and he himself was killed. The Rašaḥāt reports that this bad advice brought Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār some unpopularity. Nevertheless, in the disorders following Abū Saʿīd's death he actively preached the restoration of order; in a letter to Sultan Maḥmūd Mīrzā, who besieged Samarkand in 1470, he warned against further oppression of the people but offered his aid in the pacification of the town. His temporary eclipse and the triumph of the ʿolamāʾ came to an end under Abū Saʿīd's son and successor Sultan Aḥmad, who became even more dependent upon him than his father had been. Bābor observes that even in Transoxania power lay not so much in Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār's hands as in the begs'; yet he also testifies that Aḥrār's influence as a Sufi adviser was paramount. Thereafter he appears only infrequently on the political scene.

He died in Rabīʿ I 895 (February 1490) and was buried in his funerary ḵānaqāh at Samarkand, in the suburb of Kafšīr.

His Circle of Influence — As the successor of his master Yaʿqūb Čarḵī, it was under his auspices that the Naqšbandīya became supreme among the Sufi orders of Central Asia and began its expansion into other regions of the Muslim world. His pupil and successor Moḥammad Qāżī b. Borhān-al-Dīn wrote the Selselat al-ʿārefīn ca. 1504; the Rašaḥāt was composed in the same years. His sons at Samarkand, led by Ḵᵛāja Moḥammad Yaḥyā, supported the Timurids against the Uzbeks; Ḵᵛāja Yaḥyā was killed after the capture of Samarkand in 905/1500, and from that time on the leadership of the Naqšbandī order belonged to the shaikhs of Bukhara. His second-generation successor Aḥmad Ḵᵛājagī Kāsānī, “Maḵdūm-e Aʿẓam,” founded a ḵānaqāh in Bukhara with the help of ʿObayd-Allāh Khan.

His Poetry and Sufi Line — The recent publication of documents relating to his waqf endowments has cast new light on Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār's weight in 9th/15th-century Transoxania: the hagiographies indicate that the landholdings of Aḥrār and his immediate descendants lay not only in the welāyats of Qaršī, Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara but in the Andejān and Esfījāb/Sayrām areas too, and estimates based on taxes make it certain that they were vast. The appearance of mawlānās — a title used primarily by the higher ʿolamāʾ — among the donors testifies to the respect in which he was held even by those classes traditionally most opposed to the expansion of Sufi power. His preaching against the political quietism of his Sufi rivals (Masmūʿāt) and the priority he gave to the preservation of social order define his line.

His Works — The source records five works: ① Majmūʿa-ye morāsalāt — autograph manuscript in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences; ② Maktūbāt — non-autograph manuscripts in Tashkent, Dushanbe and Leningrad; ③ Resāla-ye wāledīya — a treatise on Sufi ethics, translated into Chaghatay by Ẓahīr-al-Dīn Bābor; ④ Resāla-ye ḥawrāʾīya — a possibly apocryphal commentary on the quatrains of the 11th-century Sufi Abū Saʿīd; ⑤ selected letters incorporated into the Šaraf-nāma, the enšāʾ anthology of ʿAbdallāh Morvārīd.

His Tomb and Complex — He was buried in his funerary ḵānaqāh in the Samarkand suburb of Kafšīr. This probably remained in existence until the 11th/17th century, when a madrasa, begun in 1040/1630-31 and completed in 1045/1635-36, was erected on the spot by the dīvānbegī Nāder Mīrzāʾī Ṭaḡāʾī. It houses the dated cenotaph of Ḵᵛāja Aḥrār.