The Misunderstood Master II

Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani:

Scholar, Jurist, and the Saint Buried Beneath His Own Legend

“Fear Allah and none other. Hope from Allah and entrust all your needs to Him; hope and want nothing from anyone except Him.” — Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani, on his deathbed (561 AH / 1166 CE)

In the corridors of Islamic spiritual history, few figures have been as celebrated and as misrepresented as Sheikh Muhyi al-Din Abu Muhammad Abdul Qadir al-Gilani al-Hasani. Born in approximately 470 AH (1077–78 CE) in the town of Na’if in Gilan, a province south of the Caspian Sea in what is today northwestern Iran, he would go on to become one of the most important scholars, preachers, and mystics the Muslim world has ever produced. Nine centuries after his death, his name is invoked daily across Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, West Africa, and beyond. Yet the man invoked in those supplications bears increasingly little resemblance to the man who taught and wrote about the essence of religious history and law. 

His lineage was distinguished on both sides. Through his father, Abu Salih Jangidost al-Hasani, his ancestry traced back to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) through Imam Hasan ibn Ali (May Allah be pleased with him). Through his mother, his lineage descended from Imam Husayn ibn Ali (May Allah be pleased with him). He was, in classical terms, both Hasani and Husayni. His mother is remembered by hagiographers as a woman who instilled in the young Abdul Qadir the habits of truthfulness and moral courage that would define his entire life. 

A famous early story recounts how, at eighteen, he refused to lie to a band of highway robbers even when the lie might have saved his forty gold dinars, saying he had promised his mother he would never deceive.

As a scholar and teacher, he was quite extraordinary. Contemporary sources record that his sermons drew crowds so large that the mosque’s boundaries had to be repeatedly extended. Scholars and mystics, merchants and soldiers, Jews and Christians came to hear him. Great many converted to Islam through his words. 

He died on the 8th of Rabi’ al-Thani, 561 AH (1166 CE), at the age of ninety-one. He was buried in his madrasa at Bab al-Daraja in Baghdad. His shrine was subsequently destroyed by the Safavid Shah Ismail I in 1508 and was rebuilt by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1535.

Any honest engagement with Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani must begin with his actual writings, not the legends that grew around him. 

Sirr al-Asrār fī mā Yaḥtāju ilayhi al-Abrār (The Secret of Secrets in What the Righteous Need) one of his shorter works is perhaps the most direct gateway into Gilani’s inner teachings. Its central theme is best elaborated in his own words: “Dear Friend, your heart is a polished mirror. You must wipe it clean of the veil of dust which has gathered upon it, because it is destined to reflect the light of divine secrets.” 

Across all his works, one theme is absolutely consistent: the Sharia is not a stage to be passed through and left behind. It is the permanent structure of the believer’s life, the condition of genuine proximity to God, and the criterion by which all spiritual claims must be tested. 

In his writings he systematically catalogues and condemns the heretical tendencies within the Sufi world of his time. Reading these passages is a profound exercise in irony, because what he condemned in the 12th century is precisely what is being done today in his name. In brevity, he could not have been more misunderstood and misrepresented. 

He writes about the spiritual degeneration that occurred when authentic Sufi transmission fragmented and diluted across generations, observing that what remained in many cases was “only an appearance wrapped in the clothing of a spiritual teacher without any meaning beneath it.” 

Some became Qalandari wandering beggars; others claimed to follow the example of Hazrat Ibrahim Adham’s abandonment of worldly sultanate. The Sheikh lists these not to celebrate the diversity of the spiritual path, but to warn against its counterfeit forms.

The Hulūliyya (Incarnationists) claimed it was lawful to gaze freely on men, women, relatives of others and to intermingle and dance freely together, which the text flatly identifies as “against the precepts of Islam and the preservation of honour and decency.” 

The Haliyya sought ecstatic trance through singing, movement, shouting, and handclapping, claiming their shaykhs had transcended the jurisdiction of religious law, which the text dismisses by noting this “does not correspond to the behaviour of the Most Beloved of Allah, who in every way abided by religious laws.”

The Awliya’iyya claimed that proximity to Allah lifts all religious obligations, and that a wali at times become superior to a prophet. This he writes is their “greatest sin, which destroys them and brings them to heresy and infidelity.” 

The Shamuraniyya used musical instruments in their rituals and eliminated all distinctions of lawful and unlawful they are called “an incorrigible gang of infidels.” The Hubbiyya said that reaching the stage of love freed one from all religious obligations. The Mutakasiliyya made a principle of laziness, begging door to door in the name of spiritual detachment. The Ilhamiyya abandoned the Quran and prayers and taught their children poetry instead, calling the Quran “a veil” and poetry their scripture.

These groups are not abstract historical curiosities. Every one of these tendencies can be observed, in various forms, in the popular religious culture of South Asia today and much of it is practised in the name of the very Sheikh who condemned it.

The transformation of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani from a Hanbali jurist and Sufi teacher into an almost mythological supernatural figure did not happen overnight, and it did not happen through malice. It happened through the natural processes of hagiographic tradition, geographic distance, cultural layering, and institutional interest.

The immediate aftermath of his death saw the production of increasingly elaborated biographical accounts by his descendants and followers. Later texts such as “The Joy of the Secrets in Abdul Qadir’s Mysterious Deeds,” attributed to Nur al-Din Ali al-Shattanufi, elevated him further, attributing supernatural interventions and miraculous deeds that accumulated with each retelling. The Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258 less than a century after his death disrupted the scholarly tradition that might have maintained critical accountability. What survived in institutional form was increasingly the order and its devotional practices rather than the close engagement with his actual texts.

When the Qadiriyya order spread to the Indian subcontinent where it would eventually become one of the most widely followed Sufi orders in history it entered a religious landscape that had its own complex relationship with shrine culture, saint veneration, and syncretic religious practice. In the context of the subcontinent, Gilani was absorbed into a devotional culture for which the specific theological content of his Hanbali jurisprudence was less immediately accessible than the power attributed to his presence, his intercession, and his miraculous capacity to help those in need.

The annual commemoration of his death anniversary the Gyarvi Sharif, celebrated on the 11th of Rabi al-Thani became one of the most widely observed religious occasions in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. It is marked by gatherings, qawwali music, the distribution of food and supplications to the Sheikh for worldly and spiritual needs. These are not in themselves necessarily problematic expressions of love for a revered figure. What is problematic is when the celebration replaces engagement with his teaching when the man becomes an icon and his books collect dust.

One scholar has noted that some of the titles applied to Gilani in popular South Asian usage are theologically problematic: names like Mukhtar-e-Kul (“Controller of All”) attribute divine sovereignty to a human being, which contradicts the very foundations of Islamic monotheism (tawhid) that Gilani himself taught and defended with scholarly rigour. Attribution of impossible titles is becoming the norm with each passing day. 

Perhaps the most fundamental betrayal of Gilani’s legacy is the widespread association of his name and his shrines with practices he explicitly and systematically condemned. 

The abandonment of prescribed prayers in favour of devotional rituals, the claim that spiritual elevation places the devotee beyond the requirements of the Sharia all of these are the very heresies catalogued and condemned. When these practices are performed at his shrines, in his name, the irony is complete. The sheikh who wrote the manual for identifying and rejecting these very tendencies has been recruited as their patron.

The shift from engaging with Gilani as a teacher and scholar to venerating him exclusively as a supernatural intercessor is perhaps the most culturally entrenched form of distortion. When a tradition ceases to read a masters’ books and begins instead to direct petitions to his spirit, it goes down a path of great disservice to the master and his legacy.  

Gilani’s vision: the warning to the traveller on the path to truth that the blind must not lead the blind, that the sight of the genuine seeker must be “so keen that you are able to distinguish the smallest particle of good from the smallest particle of evil.” That keenness of sight, in Gilani’s framework, was inseparable from knowledge, from the law, from the prophetic example. 

Recovering Gilani from the legends built around him is not an act of disrespect toward those who love him. It is, on the contrary, the most serious form of respect to take seriously what he actually said, to read what he actually wrote, and to measure the tradition that claims to follow him against his own explicitly stated standards. He did not want followers who would petition his spirit. He wanted students who would engage his knowledge. He did not want shrines where the Sharia was forgotten. He wanted communities where the Sharia was lived and enriched, from within, by the disciplines of the heart.