1404 – 1490
Khwaja Ahrar
Naqshbandi Sufi master and statesman
The fifteenth-century leader of the Naqshbandi Sufi order and, for almost forty years, the most powerful man in Samarkand. The complex built over his grave is one of the city's loveliest shrines.
© Khwajeh Awár, Public domain
From Baghistan to Samarkand
Nasir al-Din Ubaydullah ibn Mahmud was born in March 1404 in Baghistan, a village near Tashkent, to a family of farmers and traders; on his mother's side he descended from the noted shaykh Umar Baghistani. He studied in Tashkent and Samarkand, then went to Herat, where he was initiated into the Sufi path by Ya'qub Charkhi, a disciple of Baha al-Din Naqshband. 'Ahrar' is the plural of hurr, 'free': in Sufi usage, those freed from the bondage of the ego and the world.
Back in Tashkent he took up farming and soon owned vast estates and trading caravans, spending much of his income on pious endowments, on the poor and on paying ordinary people's taxes. In 1451 he backed the Timurid prince Abu Sa'id in his bid for Samarkand, and afterwards moved to the city himself.
Patron of the city
For nearly forty years Khwaja Ahrar dominated the political and spiritual life of Transoxiana. Sufis usually kept their distance from rulers; he saw dealing with them as a way to protect the people, winning tax relief and more than once brokering peace between Timurid princes fighting over the throne. Jami dedicated his poem Tuhfat al-Ahrar to him, Alisher Navoi wrote of him with reverence, and Babur later rendered his treatise Walidiyya into Turkic verse.
He died in Samarkand in 1490 and was buried behind his khanqah.
The Khoja Ahrar complex
In 1630–1636 Nadir Divan-begi, vizier of the Bukhara Khanate, built a madrasa and a mosque with winter and summer prayer halls beside the shaykh's grave; the madrasa's portal echoes the Sher-Dor on the Registan. Tradition holds that the celebrated 'Uthman Quran' was kept here; the Russian administration removed it to St Petersburg in 1869, and in 1924 the manuscript was returned to Turkestan. The restored complex stands in the south of the city.
