1542
Makhdumi Azam Kasani
Naqshbandi Sufi master and thinker
The sixteenth-century leader of the Naqshbandi order and the most revered shaykh of the Shaybanid age. He lived and is buried at Dahbed near Samarkand; his descendants became a ruling dynasty of Kashgar.
© Шухрат Саъдиев, CC BY-SA 4.0
From Kasan to Dahbed
His name was Sayyid Ahmad Khwajagi ibn Jalal al-Din Kasani; Makhdum-i Azam, 'the Greatest Master', is an honorific. He was born around 1461 (some sources say 1463–1464) in Kasan in the Ferghana Valley, studied there and in Tashkent, and became a disciple of Mawlana Muhammad Qazi, heir to Khwaja Ahrar's line. After his teacher died in 1516 he was recognised as head of the Naqshbandiyya in Transoxiana.
At the invitation of the Shaybanid sultan Janibek he moved to the Miyankal district north-west of Samarkand. Legend has it that the first thing he did there was plant ten willows — hence the name of the village, Dahbed, Persian for 'ten willows'. He laid out a garden and lived simply off its produce.
Teacher and guide
He wrote some thirty treatises in Persian, most of them known collectively as Majmu'at al-Rasa'il (Collected Treatises); manuscripts are kept at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent. They deal with dhikr and sama, the etiquette between master and disciple, and the relations of scholars with rulers. Sufis, he taught, should not shut themselves away in lodges but share the troubles of ordinary people.
Shaybanid sultans regarded him as their spiritual guide, and he was in contact with Babur too. His descendants, the Makhdumzadas, became the leading religious and political dynasty of Eastern Turkestan, above all in Kashgar, in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Dahbed complex
He died at Dahbed in 1542. Around his grave a complex grew up between the 16th and 19th centuries: a platform of tombs (dakhma) in grey marble, a many-domed khanqah, a mosque and a minaret. His descendants are buried here, as are Yalangtush Bahadur, builder of the Sher-Dor and Tilya-Kori madrasas on the Registan, and his spiritual master Khwaja Hashim Dahbedi. The complex was restored in 1996–1998; Dahbed is now a small town in Akdarya district.
